alt Hacker NewsUntil we have affordable photolithography machines (which would be cool!), hardware is never really going to be open.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_second_law: “Rock's law or Moore's second law, named for Arthur Rock or Gordon Moore, says that the cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years”
Wafer machines from the 1970s could be fairly cheap today, if there were sufficient demand for chips from the 1970s (~1MHz, no power states, 16 bit if you’re lucky, etc), but that trend would have to stop and reverse significantly for affordable wafer factories for modern hardware to be a thing.
The next 3D print revolution, photolithography your own chip wafers at home. Now that would be something!
I doubt anyone here has a clean enough room.
>> Until we have affordable photolithography....
If that comes to pass we will want software that run on earlier nodes and 32bit hardware.
> affordable photolithography machines
We'll likely never have "affordable" photolithography, but electron beam lithography will become obtainable in my lifetime (and already is, DIY, to some degree.)