| ▲ | josephg 4 hours ago | |
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. | ||