Not exactly. It’s not like he etched a thousand transistors all on a single chip. He has only 100 transistors per mask, which he exposed 12 separate times on that particular wafer. Had this been a commercial chip, the next step would be to saw the wafer into individual chips.
He tested each array of 100 and found at least one with no defects, and two with yields above 80%, which made him quite happy. As it should. So he knows his garage process is good on small chips, but probably not quite there to scale up to a larger chip yet. Yet.
I’m not saying this to take anything away from his accomplishments! His transistor density is on par with early CPU chips, which is completely awesome. But his yield is not a thousand per chip.
A kid in his garage.
