[PandaRider]

Hmmm what is a simple "hello world" project in chip design?

In computer science courses, that's as simple as a println().

In machine learning courses, that's training on mnist dataset to do character recognition.

In electrical engineering, that's buying a raspberry pi to blink led.

In chip design ... Chatgpt says to design a 1-bit full adder using verilog?

...

I understand why the article thinks the market is looking for graduate education. To design a simple chip requires an *initial investment* (as with all hardware startups really). This is different from software where one can simply launch a web app with a container hosted on your preferred cloud provider...

... That said, with the rise of LLMs lowering the barrier of entry of software even lower (e.g. vibe coding), may we see more rise of hardware startups/innovations?

[GuB-42]

FPGA dev boards are cheap nowadays, and you can start coding in a hardware definition language with a simulator. The ChatGPT answer of doing a 1-bit full adder as "hello world" makes sense.

You are obviously not going to etch silicon at home, but the design part is rather accessible as far as hardware goes.

[aeonik]

You can absolutely etch silicon at home. Processes like wet etching (KOH, HF), reactive ion etching (RIE), laser ablation, and even electron beam lithography using repurposed CRTs are all viable at the DIY scale.

They're not used in high-volume manufacturing (you’re not replacing ASML), but they’re solid for prototyping, research, and niche builds.

Just don’t underestimate the safety aspect—some of these chemicals (like HF) are genuinely nasty, and DIY high voltage setups can bite hard.

You're not hitting nanometer nodes, but for MEMS, sensors, and basic ICs, it’s totally within reach if you know what you’re doing.

[spwa4]

> You are obviously not going to etch silicon at home

No? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg

[pjc50]

> rise of LLMs lowering the barrier of entry of software even lower

Getting to your first wafer costs something like $250k and upwards of fab costs, depending on what process you're using. Hence much of chip design effort is already spent on verification, it's probably over 50% by now. This is the exact opposite of vibes because mistakes are expensive.

Businesswise it's quite tough B2B sales because you're selling into other people's product development pipelines. They need to trust you because you can sink their project, way over and above the cost of the actual parts.

Edit: I cannot emphasise enough how much more conservative the culture is in chip design and EE more broadly. It belongs to a world not just before "vibe coding" but before "web 2.0". It's full of weird closed source very expensive tooling, and is built on a graveyard of expensive mistakes. You've got to get the product 100% right on the first go.

Well, maybe the second go, production silicon is usually "B" rev. But that's it. Economics dictate you then need to be able to sell that run for a few years before replacing it with an upgraded product line.

[StormChaser_5]

The rule of thumb I use for chip design is that verification takes at least 2/3s of development. Sometimes more. 50% would be nice but I think is optimistic

[StormChaser_5]

I think you would just buy a cheap FPGA board and use that wouldn't you? No need to do a full chip until you know what you are doing. That would be like building a server farm just to do your software hello world

[raverbashing]

In chip design it is using languages like verilog that don't mean what they actually mean and just confuses everybody

[Manfred]

I guess open something like simulator.io and start designing?

[tamat]

The one from Sebastian Lague is great too: https://sebastian.itch.io/digital-logic-sim