Making RAM at Home [video]

Admit it, deep down, our inner engeering child also wants to build a semiconductor clean room ;)

I only have raw RAM, pastured RAM is wrong.

I get my DRAM needs at the RAM ranch.

You’re not sure if someone building a RAM clean room in a shed is appropriate for HackerNews, literally “news for nerds”? A dictionary purchase may be warranted

If you haven't seen this one, I highly recommend it:

Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4&t=2070s

It's quite old but I think there is no modern version of it.

I've tried posting to HN a few times but it hasn't gained traction for some reason, but I find it absolutely mind blowing.

I think if it's interesting to you then it's worth posting, and letting the voting system do it's thing. I only rarely post because by the time I've seen something it's usually already been posted

Tbh this is exactly the sort of thing I'd come here to see

Recently I saw a post about Bonsai trees on the front page. Making your own RAM is 100% more relevant to HN than quite a few posts I see on the main page.

Actually possible if you mount google drive and move your swap file there.

With memory prices what they are maybe there is a business opportunity for a return of SoftRAM 95

Chairman Trump will have a semiconductor furnace in every backyard.

Is it? Looks like this video is "locked" on Patreon requiring "this post and more exclusive work. Join for $10/month" yet got, as of now, 329 611 views ... so are they just making $3M/month or is it not really working?

And are doing exceptional things (like building their own cleanroom in a shed)

Content creation was always about content. If you can make something special and engaging, audience will come.

A transistor effectively is an AND gate. If there is a charge on both the source and the gate, then charge can move to drain. So if you charge up the capacitor and you connect it to the source of another transistor then you can check whether it is still charged by putting a charge to the gate and see if there is charge on the drain.

And you are right, that charge on the drain can then be used both to drive some logic and to activate the recharging of the capacitor that was just discharged.

By the way I am being handwavy about "charge" moving about, if you really want to learn the electronics it is more correct to call it a voltage relative to some ground that the charge always moves towards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_random-access_memory#P...

It turns out they intentionally drain a bit of the storage capacitor, and amplify that weak signal. Some of that amplified charge is then fed back to storage.

There's another video on YouTube by the same guy detailing how he built his backyard clean room shed. I was kind of surprised at how easy it was - it's definitely a construction project that requires some specialized knowledge, but the fact that it's tractable at all for one person with a shed is pretty amazing to me.

They will preemptively rent all the sheds in the usa.

The graphs towards the end were discharge curves for a single transistor/capacitor cell out of only 16 present, if I understood correctly? So "enough cells to count as memory" and "addressing logic" are definitely future work (it looked like he wanted to characterize what the refresh cycle would have to look like before actually building more.) I was kind of surprised that the "use a microscope as a photolithography projector" approach worked at all, it will be interesting to see how that scales up...