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The question is when price/performance hits financial limits. That point may be close, if not already passed. Interestingly, this hasn't happened for wafer fab
by Animats 1y ago
The question is when price/performance hits financial limits. That point may be close, if not already passed.
Interestingly, this hasn't happened for wafer fabs. A modern wafer fab costs US$1bn to US$3bn, and there is talk of US$20bn wafer fabs. Around the year 2000, those would have been un-financeable. It was expected that fab cost was going to be a constraint on feature size. That didn't happen.
For years, it was thought that the ASML approach to extreme UV was going to cost too much. It's a horrible hack, shooting off droplets of tin to be vaporized by lasers just to generate soft X-rays. Industry people were hoping for small synchrotrons or X-ray lasers or E-beam machines or something sane. But none of those worked out. Progress went on by making a fundamentally awful process work commercially, at insane cost.
- schmidtleonard 1y agoFundamentally awful but spiritually delightful.
- azeirah 1y agoSometimes awful is the best we have, we don't have anything that performs at a similar level to EUV machines by ASML but are much simpler or tenable than what we have right now, right? Perhaps we will find something better in the future, but for now awful is the best we got for the cutting edge. Also, when is cutting edge not the worst it's ever been?
- xyzzy123 1y agoIt's hard to value $20bn in 2025 vs say $2bn for cutting edge fab in 2000. Personally I don't think CPI captures the relative value of investments well. If you compare it as % of gdp, or relative to m2 or % of S&P 500, or even size of electronics industry it's maybe 2x-4x or something. Which is still an increase and still a lot but doesn't seem as crazy to me. Another lens on it: the most valuable car company in 2000 was $50bn and in 2025 it is $1000bn, which I think says more about dollars than cars.