Can't believe chip manufacturing is such a centralized process that the entire world is reliant on Taiwan
The FOSS spirit is pretty much non existent in the semiconductor world
Discussion
I imagine it has a lot to do with intellectual property laws
Has to be. I need to investigate it more
It's just curious that some sectors in the economy have people leaving businesses and starting directly competiting companies all the time, while others never do.
Some bottlenecks must exist that prevent more competition in the manufacture of semiconductors and chips. Surely, such a high demand sector would have many more competitors.
There are countries that do not honor IP laws. Iran for example. So it's probably not only IP but also actual trade secrets.
Found a guy named Sam Zeloof who made the world's first homemade silicon chip in his garage fab 5 or so years ago
- Sam has a YouTube channel with a bunch of videos of him working on his lab (www.youtube.com/@SamZeloof)
- Z2, his v2 homemade chip made 4 years ago has 100 transistors in it (www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg)
- He co-founded a company called Atomic Semi (atomicsemi.com) couple of years ago to continue working on making chips and building things from scratch if needed. They already seem to have a team of 50+ people and hiring a bunch more (check their careers page)
- He also started Hack Fab (hackerfab.org) with a couple of other guys, which is trying to be an open source semiconductor fab. Check out their docs docs.hackerfab.org/home and their Discord server discord.gg/hacker-fab-1143959339179200562, they have a lot of good crowdsourced resources
There is hope 🌕