Our goal
Make the knowledge, process, and tooling behind chip fabrication legible, reproducible, and buildable by far more people.
We are not building a rival fab or competing with TSMC. We want to learn the closed-source procedures, then reinvent each step through experiments and ablations until we can make good devices reproducibly.
Why it matters
We are building a fast, transparent, modular prototyping stack for simple designs at larger nodes, where iteration speed and low cost matter more than density. Think sensor interfaces, mixed-signal test chips, neurotech, and AI accelerator prototypes.
Design → Fabricate → Measure → Debug → Repeat
We want that loop to be as fast as possible. An FPGA can validate logic, but not how real silicon behaves across process, layout, and device effects. A quick, cheap tapeout can.
Projects
A basic chip process needs tools to grow, deposit, coat, and pattern material. We are building each one, starting hacky and making it robust and safe.
- Tube furnace
- Grows silicon dioxide on the wafer for insulation, masking, or a gate oxide. Read the build log.
- Working
- Spin coater
- Spins the wafer at high speed to spread photoresist into a thin, even film. Read the build log.
- Working
- Magnetron sputtering
- Deposits thin metal films that become contacts, interconnects, and electrodes.
- In progress
- Lithography stepper
- Projects a mask pattern onto the photoresist to define where material stays.
- Planned
Alongside the tools, we are writing a process proposal built around one question: when a multi-step process goes wrong, how do we find and fix the problem? Every experiment gets documented.
Side projects: an optical processing unit, and NV-diamond quantum sensing.
Supported by
Hacker Fab is funded by grants from Shopify and Emergent Ventures. Thank you.
