LAST AUGUST, INTEL revealed fresh details on its plan to build a "mega-fab" on US soil, a $100 billion factory where 10,000 workers will churn out a new generation of chips studded with billions of transistors. The same month, 22-year-old Sam Zeloof announced his own semiconductor milestone. It was achieved in his family's New Jersey garage, about 30 miles from where the first transistor was made at Bell Labs in 1947. With salvaged and homemade equipment, Zeloof produced a chip with 1,200 transistors-by himself. He sliced wafers of silicon, patterned them with microscopic designs using UV light, and dunked them in acid by hand, chronicling it all on You- Tube and his blog. Zeloof figures that, well, "another human figured it out, so I can too, even if it takes me longer. Maybe it's over-confidence." This was Zeloof's second chip. He had started making transistors in 2017 as a junior in high school and produced his first chip the following year. His processors lag Intel's by technological eons, but he argues only half-jokingly that he's making faster progress than the semiconductor industry did in its early days. Zeloof's second chip has 200 times as many transistors as his first, a growth rate outpacing Moore's law, the rule of thumb coined by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore that says the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years.
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