>>2920343thermal evaporation is pretty cheap and easy to set up, there's a lot of diy ones for that
he was gifted some expensive and old equipment but it's still impressive regardless, especially considering how young he was when he started it
chip fabrication is a bit simpler than most people expect it to be (especially with basic/old ones like that) but still takes quite a bit of playing around with a lot of processes to get working. If you really have low standards you could probably even get it done with only a few hundred dollars and a bit of work, but the results will not be particularly good