I think this is a good Idea. If I am not mistaken I have a way to store 0-9 on each bit.(It does work t t involves chaining transistors together and biasing them with slightly different voltages) its a little bit complicated and Im not sure if its perfected yet but itll get done.
I think tutorials on how to build microchips would be a good tutorial. I was also using inductors as volatile memory storage(like ram) so you can use that in your circuits if you want.
But yeah if you want to, you should have a printing service where people can send you schematics for microchips and you can build them too.
but again supply people with software so they can test their designs.
the more tutorials the merrier. but yeah I was using inductors in each bit to store data for certain amounts of time. it changes the way the microchip looks but it can be done.
But im also working on analog computers too so ill have a lot of passive integrated circuits that will need printing too so i thought i would just throw this out there because it might further your business.
Are you talking about taking discrete parts and creating new IC functionality or are you talking about actually creating new IC dice?
VLSI design is way outside the demographic of people that Sparkfun targets. The costs associated with making even simple ICs are hugely expensive. The best reasonable way to create new IC functionality is to use reprogrammable logic like FPGAs and CPLDs. With those, you are stuck in the binary world since you can’t change the base building blocks of logic they are constructed from.
There are a few sources in Chinawho will build your requirements using their range of die. You design your requirements from there library of functions and the will happily bang out batches of 500 pieces.
They take they die you have selected, stick them on a substrate, then hook the die pads to each other and finally encapsulate them. Note that even these guys don’t make their own dies, they buy them from far larger manufacturers.