I suspected that this was the case when they mentioned adding "one bit at a time" -- the CPU design that they implemented is Olof Kindgren's SERV [0], a tiny bit-serial risc-v CPU/soc (award-winning, of course).

From [1]:

> Olof Kindgren

> 5th April 2025 at 10:59 am

> It’s a great achievement, but I’m of course a little sad to see that it’s not mentioned anywhere that Wuji is just a renaming of my CPU, SERV. They even pasted in block diagrams from my documentation.

[0] https://github.com/olofk/serv

[1] https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/2d-32-bit-ri...

They do mention SERV in their references (38).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08759-9

Sadly I can't access the full article right now.

That sort of copying without attribution should be considered outright misconduct; it certainly would be in academia.

Huh? This is a paper published in Nature, and it does cite Olof Kindgren and SERV in the references: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08759-9#Bib1

The paper itself is behind a paywall so I can't see it, but it looks from the references like they provided proper attribution.

It's unfortunate that some of the articles around it don't mention that, but it seems like the main point of this is discussing the process for building the transistors, and then showing that can be used to build a complete CPU, not the CPU design itself which they just used an off-the-shelf open source one, which is designed to use a very small number of gates.

> The paper itself is behind a paywall so I can't see it

https://archive.org/details/s41586-025-08759-9

That's China for you.

I'm still waiting for that inkjet printer that can print transistors.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-01391-2

Has anyone tried to replicate this? Seems like it would be very useful for amateur makers/hackers were it not for the $23k printer cost (no idea for the cost of the discussed silver ink). But surely someone crazy had access to one and tried or has tried to replicate on a cheaper printer? I figure HN has a decent chance of helping find said persons?

It's possible that the inkjet printed transistor is both replicable and impractical for building a full microprocessor.

The inkjet transistor article says "A total of 216 devices were tested with a yield of greater than 95%, thus demonstrating the true scalability of the process for achieving integrated systems." But 95% yield on the transistor level implies vanishingly low yield at the device level when you need thousands of transistors to build a full microprocessor.

Even the new MoS2 microprocessor discussed in the Ars article wasn't fabricated all at once. It was built up from sub-components like shift registers containing fewer transistors, then those components were combined to make a full microprocessor. See for example "Supplementary Fig. 7 | Yield analysis of wafer-level 8-bit registers." in the supplementary information:

https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...

The yield of 8-bit registers, each consisting of 144 transistors, can reach 71% on the wafer.

My knowledge of transistors is pretty limited[0]. Does the yield percentage refer to number of successful chips on a substrate or look more at the total number of successful transistors? (Or confusing hybrid-term like rain forecasts) I believe your comment implies the latter? So the number of successful processors is quite low? How many failed transistors can you have in a working microprocessor? (Probably not an easy to answer question?)

[0] Am I remembering correctly that this is your area?

if you could print transistors, you could make computers the way Wozniak made them - a bunch of chips with a ton of wiring.

You can do that easily and cheaply today without a fancy transistor printer.

You can find Apple II schematics easily enough online. All the chips are common, off-the-shelf parts still available today. You can send the KiCAD drawings (also available) to a company like PCBWay and have PCBs made very cheaply and in small quantity. Then all you have to do is solder in the chips and other components and connect the board to a power supply.

I think the appeal is the you can print out a couple of pages of chips and wire them up, not send out for chips and PCBs.

You can order a whole batch of chips and wire them up on breadboards without sending away to have a PCB made. The PCB step is the last one when you want to finalize your computer and package it up.

Ben Eater actually has a free course on YouTube [1] all about building a breadboard computer!

[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2565d...

I don’t think they’ve tried it yet, but it’s seems up the alley of Applied Science on YouTube

I'm not sure this is Ben's forte, but you're right that I wouldn't be surprised if he tries it, though he has done some circuit stuff[0,1] so nothing would surprise me from him. (Hi Ben! Love the work!) BUT I do think this is something Sam Zeloof[2] try. He's done some lithography using a projector[3]. Also there's Jeri Ellsworth, but I think she's shifted to mostly working with her AR project. Tons of old videos on that stuff if you're into it.

Side note: I'm assuming anyone who knows any of these people would be interested that a new Dan Gelbart video just dropped[5]!

  -----------------------------------------

Other side note: @YouTube people (and @GoogleSearch), can we talk about search? The updates have been progressively making it harder to find these types of accounts. People who do *highly* technical things. I get that these are aimed at extremely specific audiences but this type of information is some of the most valuable information on the planet. Lots of knowledge is locked into people's heads and these classes of videos are one of the biggest booms to knowledge distribution we've ever seen in the course of humanity. I understand that this does not directly lead to profits to YouTube (certainly it DOES for Google Search), but indirectly it does (keeps these users on your platform!) and has a high benefit to humanity in general. The beauty of YouTube and Google was you could access anything. That we recognized everyone was different and we could find like minded people in a vast sea. The problem search was meant to solve was to get us access to hard to find things. To find needles in ever growing haystacks! Please, I really do not want to return to the days of pre-search. Nor even early search! It should be _easier_ to find niche topics these days, not harder. LLMs aren't going to fix this. This is becoming an existential crisis and it needs to be resolved.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIqhpxul_og

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYgIuc-VqHE

[2] https://www.youtube.com/@SamZeloof

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVoldtNpIzI

[4] https://www.youtube.com/@JeriEllsworthJabber

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuZjjActWmQ

LLMs could help if they were specifically applied to the task [1], however people are actually applying them to the generation of countless slop videos. Google's problem, which I think there is no cure for, is that Google believes it is #1 and to quote Fatboy Slim "We're #1 why try harder?" If in some way they feel they have competition it is to be a 2nd rate TikTok, not be a better version of what made YouTube great.

In the meantime, for everybody that's been turned on to something really awesome and creative on YouTube somebody else got turned on to something really toxic.

[1] Something significant happens every 10 years in search relevance, and SBERT was one of those.

Again someone mistaking LLMs with knowledge bases. Must be a day finishing in `y`

I am building one. Right after I find out where to buy liquid semi-conductor paste.

I like where they say "a sheet that is only a bit over a single atom thick, due to the angles between its chemical bonds" it's funny that material science has achived ultimate precision, but it can only be talked about in general terms Is there any exact way to describe the thickness of molebdium disulfide sheets?, beyond "a bit over one atom thick" clearly they are etching parts of the sheet, and somehow attaching leads, but is it done strictly in two dimensions, ie: litteral, flat land?