A YouTuber and semiconductor engineer known as Dr. Semiconductor has successfully manufactured working LEDs inside the backyard cleanroom he built to pursue homemade computer chips, marking the latest step in his campaign to prove semiconductor fabrication needn't be confined to giant corporations. Matthew Hartensveld, who previously built his own DRAM cells in the shed-based facility, undertook the LED project not as a standalone experiment but as a way to solve a packaging problem: aligning tiny contacts on an opaque silicon die with a circuit board is difficult, whereas transparent gallium nitride (GaN) LEDs let him perfect the alignment and bonding process needed for future RAM chips.

Rather than using hazardous chlorine gases typically required to etch GaN, Hartensveld used an ultraviolet laser etcher, then applied standard photoresist and metal deposition techniques to add positive and negative contacts, producing diodes that emitted blue light as expected. He went on to attach the LEDs to a circuit board using indium bumps, visible through the transparent material, and even altered the light's colour to a warmer white using the same cerium-doped yttrium aluminium garnet coating found in commercial LED bulbs. Hartensveld says the packaging techniques developed can now be applied to RAM or other components, though he still needs to shrink the transistor and capacitor sizes before producing a functional memory module.