Making RAM at Home

A hobbyist engineer converts a backyard shed into a class 100 clean room and builds semiconductor fabrication tools from scratch to create homemade DRAM cells. The process covers the full fabrication flow: silicon wafer cleaving, thermal oxidation, photolithography with a custom microscope stepper, phosphorus doping for source/drain formation, gate oxide growth, aluminum metallization via sputtering, and electrical testing. The resulting DRAM cell successfully stores a bit and charges a capacitor to 3V within hundreds of nanoseconds, though charge retention is only ~2ms versus 64ms+ for commercial DRAM. The project demonstrates a working proof-of-concept for home semiconductor fabrication, with plans to scale up to a full addressable array.