The most recent Planet Money podcast talks about how the latest microchip innovation was proposed by a nuclear weapons researcher and cost the us government rou

The most recent Planet Money podcast talks about how the latest microchip innovation was proposed by a nuclear weapons researcher and cost the us government roughly 300-400 million but the engineering research to make a practical ultraviolet etching machine cost ASML nine billion and twenty years of development, they said if they knew it would take that long they might never have attempted it but they are now the sole maker of such devices which seems to have made the investment worthwhile.