[amluto]

> You still have to deposit the e-beam resist while keeping the wafers extremely clean. This is non-trivial.

True, but this is more or less the same process for e-beam and photolithography (as I understand it). I don’t see a fundamental reason why one couldn’t replace one ASML EUV machine with, say, 1000 e-beam machines and run them all in parallel. You would need the e-beam machines to be extremely reliable, but they’re conceptually simple devices and this should be possible.

(With vague ballpark numbers from the Internet, an EUV machine appears to be about 10k times as expensive as a SEM. Building 10k e-beam machines at the same cost as one Alibaba SEM would be an interesting challenge, and there would be factors pushing the price in both directions.)

[nwiswell]

> I don’t see a fundamental reason why one couldn’t replace one ASML EUV machine with, say, 1000 e-beam machines and run them all in parallel.

Fab floorspace is also very expensive, nevermind that's not even close to a realistic price per system (the factory interface alone costs $100k+)

[mrtnmcc]

Could also do multiple parallel e-beams to a chip (within reason). This might amortize some of the cost.

[nwiswell]

Definitely, but it doesn't solve the reliability problem