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0 pointsayewo4mo ago0 comments

You are ignoring the possibility of technological disruption.

Apple disrupted Nokia and Blackberry. ARM is currently disrupting Intel.

What if someone lands on a break-through using a completely different tech: what if X-ray lithography [1] becomes viable enough that they don’t have to acquire state-of-art EUV machines from ASML?

[1] X-ray lithography was abandoned in the 80s but it is being revisited by Substrate https://substrate.com/our-purpose. They are an American company that hopes to make it commercially viable by being cheaper and far less complex than EUV.

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KK7NIL4mo ago

Substrate is a scam; their marketing is misleading and they have yet to answer to the fundamental reason why X-ray and e-beam failed over 40 years ago (despite it being generally agreed they were the future of litho and optical would soon be dead): writing one line at a time is extremely slow compared to optical which can scan a whole reticle in a fraction of a second.

E-beam is still used for making DUV/EUV masks where the low write speed can be tolerated but no one in the industry thinks it will replace EUV in the silicon litho steps any time soon.

But lay people eat this crap up and journalists turn a blind eye either because they're literally paid PRC shills or because clicks are everything now a days.

impossiblefork4mo ago

I think you're general point is completely true, but Substrate is a bad example, since the people running it don't appear to be semiconductor experts and it's probably a fraud.

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