>Modern RAM is made in fabs, which are ridiculously expensive to manufacture. Modern EUV lithography machines cost around 500M each. They're manufactured by hand. Only one company in the world knows how to manufacture them right now.

You're wrong here. You don't need the most cutting edge ASML EUV machines to make RAM. Most RAM fabs still use standard DUV.

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josephg 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Are DUV machines cheap and easy to manufacture? I suspect if they were, we'd see a lot of cheap RAM hit the market.

Maybe some RAM chips don't need EUV lithography. but I suspect I'm still right about the economics.

	▲	nl an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		DUV machines are ok, but it still takes 2 years to build a clean room factory.
	▲	joe_mamba an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>Are DUV machines cheap and easy to manufacture? 100 million DUV machine is not your limiting factor when a whole fab costs 2-3 billion and requires specialized knowhow that few people in the world have in order to get good yields and be profitable. Otherwise everyone would be making chips if all you needed was to go out and buy a 100 million DUV machine then hit the "print" button to churn out chips like it's a Bambu 3d printer. >I suspect if they were, we'd see a lot of cheap RAM hit the market. Nobody spends 2-3 billion to open new fab just to make commodity low margin chips. New fabs are almost always built for the cutting edge, then once they pay off their investment costs, they slowly transition into making low margin chips as they age out of the cutting edge, but nobody builds fabs for legacy nodes that have a lot of competition and low profitability, except maybe if national security(the taxpayer) would subsidize those losses somehow. >but I suspect I'm still right about the economics. You are not.

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Animats 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> You're wrong here. You don't need the most cutting edge ASML EUV machines to make RAM. Most RAM fabs still use standard DUV.

Ah. Please check that. Which types of DRAM can be made in a DUV fab? Obviously the older ones, but are those obsolete for new computers. This really matters.

	▲	sehansen 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		From Micron, everything up to their 1-beta node is DUV. Their 1-gamma node they debuted last year is the only EUV node they have. If you bought a Micron-based DDR5 RAM stick a year ago it would have been DUV and you could get those up to DDR5-8000. 1-gamma increases that to DDR5-9200, so if you can live with ~15% less performance DUV is good enough.
	▲	amluto 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		CXMT’s entire portfolio is made without EUV, and CXMT claims to have acceptable yield and performance comparable to other producers. Keep in mind that the high bandwidths of modern RAM modules aren’t really a property of the RAM cells so much as a property of the read and write circuitry and the DDR or HBM transceivers, and those are a large part of the IP but a small part of the die. There is no such thing as “double data rate” or “high bandwidth” DRAM cells. Even DRAM cells from the 1990s could be read in microseconds. Reading and streaming your fancy AI model weights is an embarrassingly parallel problem and even 1 TB/sec does not even come close to stressing the ability of the raw cells to be read. This in contrast to, say, modern tensor processors where the actual ALUs set a hard cap on throughput and everyone works hard to come closer to the cap. Take a look at what makes a modern computer with good RAM performance work: it’s the interconnect between the RAM and processor.
	▲	joe_mamba 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		DDR4 and basic HBM is still in high demand right now and that was made before the first EUV fabs came online.