How a 22-year-old has been making microchips using equipment from his parents' garage

Sam Zeloof, a 22-year-old American, produced a chip with 1,200 transistors from homemade equipment in his parents garage.

Zeloof documented the entire process on his own website.

I have a mentality that another human figured it out so I can, too, even if it takes me longer, he said.

Zeloof made his first chip.

Moore's law states chip transistors double in number about every two years, but Zeloof's second chip has 200 times more transistors.

Zeloof wants to get the number of transistors used in the 4004 chip to 2,300.

Zeloof wants to make chips more accessible to those without large budgets.

He said that the high barrier to entry will make you risk-averse.

He said that in the beginning, he was told that it couldn't be done.

He was determined to try.

Zeloof was aware that he didn't have the facilities of big production companies so he turned to books from the 1960s and 1970s. He could see how companies used to make chips at regular workstations.

He used various platforms to find old equipment.

He was able to get an old electron microscope that would have cost him $250,000 in the 1990s.

According to the report, he got it for $1,000.

He wants to open people's minds to the possibility that we can do some of this stuff at home.