Maybe one of the e-beam startups can pull it off. Aside from scaling issues, direct electron beam lithography ought to outperform optical lithography by many m

Maybe one of the e-beam startups can pull it off. Aside from scaling issues, direct electron beam lithography ought to outperform optical lithography by many metrics, not to mention that there would never be costs associated with mask revisions. Here’s one of them: https://multibeamcorp.com/ https://multibeamcorp.com/ I remember touring a little research fab, maybe around 2000, that could achieve feature sizes comparable to what TSMC can do today. But they were very, very, very slow. (Fast-moving electrons are easy to make, easy to aim, and have teeny tiny wavelengths that entirely sidestep most the issues that people have with photons having obnoxiously large wavelengths. But electrons have all manner of downsides that explain why fabs spend many billions of dollars on optical lithography, one of which is that they repel each other, which makes shining a lot of them at a wafer at once quite problematic.)