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by AaronFriel 1211 days ago
> The machines themselves couldn't be "super" cheap, that's impossible.

There are a few dimensions of cost that can be optimized though, right? My understanding is that ASML is making ~10s of these EUV machines per year because of the extreme complexity of many components.

1 comments

Sure. Chief among those dimensions is the fact that it's not used as a serious production technology, so the manufacturing of these systems doesn't benefit from economy of scale.

E-beam certainly does provide a bounding limit on how expensive EUV can get, but we're not in danger of hitting that limit anytime soon.

I expect that EUV will become cheaper/more productive per dollar in the medium term, unless ASML starts acting uncomfortably monopolistically (and it's probably in their interest to drive EUV adoption to starve out Nikon and Canon, anyway)