[frognumber]

Personally, I think there is an undertapped market for extremely low volume productions. The cost of a mask set is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there is very little custom or domain-specific IC design.

I do think it's a slow market to emerge. They'd need very patient funding. If nothing else, tooling needs to catch up, which is 5+ years.

[paulmd]

apart from massively-parallel beam systems as discussed elsewhere here, it seems more likely to me that e-beams could be used for mask-making, which might make it easier for smaller clients to make the jump to modern processes.

like if you can do a 7nm or 14nm tier mask maybe that becomes a pivot to a 28nm actual production process, or maybe it makes multipatterning and some of the other advanced-node tricks more accessible at a semi-reasonable cost.