lithography

While IBM is talking about EUV lithography, Intel still seems to be complaining about multi-pattern lithography, so it seems pretty clear that Intel is behind IBM for 7nm.

Also, CPU costs are driven mostly by lithography, and if you're doubling the number of high resolution lithography steps, you aren't saving much money compared to just making larger area CPUs.

It replaces the air gap from the final lens of the lithography system with water which has greater IOR.

Electron-beam lithography is a technique that works, but because it's very slow, it's also very expensive.

Suposing Intel and AMD working at the same lithography scale, could be interesting to see that.

This is where 450mm wafers and EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) were supposed to come in.

And EUV based lithography(printing finer circuits using xrays), which intel recently bought 10-20 machines of, also took a very long time.

That's the most advanced node where lithography is still (somewhat) manageable for custom IP design.

That only affects yield, and the lithography process is largely the same, so nope.

Especially since the 130 nm ground rule, lithography has not been the main limiter.

When chips started hitting the limits of the photo-lithography process, they switched to lasers, UV, DUV, and now EUV.

Certain parts of the cleanroom will look yellow--these are the spaces where they do lithography with resists that are openly accessible to the air.

Lithography's future beyond 14nm seems bleak at this moment.