A DIY tube furnace for creating ICs

Trendy built-in circuit (IC) chips can have transistors as small as two nanometers, which is just about 10 silicon atoms laid end-to-end. At that scale, fabrication seems extra like chemistry than any form of bodily manipulation — a machinist isn’t carving tiny transistors into silicon wafers. For a lot of sorts semiconductors, the fabrication course of requires a really highly effective furnace. In the event you’re occupied with creating your personal ICs, then YouTuber ProjectsInFlight has a video explaining find out how to construct your personal furnace.

This can be a design for a tube furnace that may attain 1200°C, much like the type that labs purchase for a lot of hundreds of {dollars}. Producing that a lot warmth in a controllable method just isn’t a trivial activity and that is way more sophisticated than setting up a furnace for one thing like aluminum casting. The heating aspect is a coil of nichrome wire, which wraps round a quartz glass tube that may stand up to the warmth. A ridiculous quantity of insulation surrounds the tube and wire to include the warmth.

Nichrome wire heats up by way of resistance when a present passes by way of, so you could possibly simply join it to an influence supply. However that wouldn’t be controllable, so ProjectsInFlight created a management board primarily based on an Arduino UNO Rev3 board. Like a 3D printer controller dealing with sizzling finish temperature by way of proportional–integral–spinoff (PID), this makes use of a closed-feedback PID loop to modulate energy to the nichrome wire in response to readings from a thermocouple. The management interface has a dial for setting the goal temperature and a 16×2 character LCD to indicate the present temperature detected by the thermocouple. The Arduino makes use of a solid-state relay (SSR) to modulate the facility going by way of the nichrome wire.

A easy sheet steel enclosure homes the tube and, in a separate space, the management electronics. The furnace appears to be able to safely reaching the specified temperature, so ProjectsInFlight can now use it for semiconductor experiments.