I did some materials engineering coursework in college, and I think your comment significantly underestimates the technical complexity of <100nm process node ma

I did some materials engineering coursework in college, and I think your comment significantly underestimates the technical complexity of <100nm process node manufacturing. We had many brilliant minds working on these problems for decades, but it took time, skill, effort, and money over these decades to achieve each milestone of development. Now each of these firms (and each of their suppliers) has trade secrets that go deep, and barring some unlikely breakthrough of brilliance, these secrets can't be independently discovered by the brightest minds in any less than the time it already took to discover and develop them in the first place. There's also the problem of supply chains -- modern fab tech requires a ton of downstream tech: the fab machines, the parts in them, and the places those parts were developed and manufactured... and the machines that were required there as well (repeat...). Also the raw materials, especially rare earth minerals.