It's a hard reality to accept, but the RAM Crisis continues to worsen every day. With the advent of RAM-hungry AI, prices on RAM and various other tech-related hardware like CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, and much more have skyrocketed to insane, unaffordable prices for most ordinary folk.
In the midst of this ever-growing catastrophe, one YouTuber decided to take matters into his own hands and build RAM himself since commercially available RAM is expensive to buy and scarce in stock.
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So, how does one go about building RAM? Dr. Semiconductor begins by explaining that RAM is largely made up of huge arrays with lots of capacitors and transistors.
He begins creating the RAM chips by cutting a few silicon chips from a large wafer sheet as part of the initial preparation and cleaning stages.
The next step involves building a 330nm thick layer of oxide on top of the silicon chips in a hot furnace. Next, the doctor places an adhesive layer and photoresistant film on top of the oxide layer.
Afterward, the chips are exposed to UV rays so a design mark can be applied, allowing a deeper solution to clean up the areas hit by the rays.
The next step revolves around forming the source and drain of the transistors. This includes etching layers, making the silicon chips more conductive by using a doping agent, and pushing the agent deeper by annealing the chips.
After some deposition and erosion steps, Dr. Semiconductor uses a tiny stencil to spray the chips with aluminum to wipe away the excess. Now the RAM chip is fully formed, layered, and ready for a test drive.
Now, these newly created RAM chips can't be tested with conventional machines with wires due to their extremely small size.
So, Dr. Semiconductor uses a C-V Plotter machine to test its capacitance instead, and it shows promising results as the DIY RAM chips are capable of producing 12pF capacitance, marking the experiment as a success.
However, this small-scale product is only the beginning. Dr. Semiconductor concludes the video by saying that he plans to use what he's learned to cook up more DIY RAM chips so he can stitch them together to create a much larger array that can be hooked up to a PC.
Windows Central's take
Now, I'm no scientist when it comes to tech, but being able to create RAM with basically DIY equipment in your backyard is insanely impressive.
I know for certain we definitely need more RAM for PC gaming, because who knows how much RAM AAA titles like Witcher 4 and Grand Theft Auto 6 (when it eventually leaves Xbox and PlayStation exclusivity) will need when they launch in the future?
If Dr. Semiconductor's plans on creating homemade PC-compatible RAM chips pay off, we could start to see a positive turnaround on the RAM Crisis with more RAM being readily available at potentially more affordable prices.
Only time will tell for certain if this experiment pays off in the long run, but in the meantime, we can best hope for the future and if we can eventually play DOOM on these DIY chips.
🗨️ Over to you
What do you think of Dr. Semiconductor's DIY RAM chip experiment? Will this help resolve the RAM Crisis in the long run, or do you think this will amount to a small band-aid on a gaping wound that can't be healed so long as AI is around to eat our RAM?
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