Make: Volume 87

M

att Venn is a man on a mission: to make it

possible for any maker anywhere to design

their own chips, going from the core concepts of

how the layers in a semiconductor interact all the

way up to making a fully functional, application-

specific integrated circuit (ASIC) of their own —

and receiving the physical chip in the mail.

“Even though I’ve been using microcontrollers

for 20 years, I never thought that someone

[like me] could make them,” Venn recalls —

this despite his history in working with field-

programmable gate array (FPGA) chips, which

allow you to customize their hardware internally.

“It was so out of my idea of what was possible. ...