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You're just talking about a lithography machine. Patterning is one step out of thousands in a modern process (albeit an important one). There's plenty more stuff needed for a production line, this isn't a 3D printer but for chips. And that's just for the FEOL stuff, then you still need to do BEOL :). And packaging. And testing (accelerated/environmental, too). And failure analysis. And...

Also, you know, there's a whole process you'll need to develop. So prepare to be not making money (but spending tons of it on running the lines) until you have a well tested PDK.



> 3D printer but for chips

how about a farm of electron microscopes? these should work


Canon has been working on an alternative to EUV lithography called nanoimprint lithography. It would be a bit closer to the idea of having an inkjet printer make the masks to etch the wafers. It hasn't been proven in scale and there's a lot of thinking this won't really be useful, but it's neat to see and maybe the detractors are wrong.

https://global.canon/en/technology/nil-2023.html

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/nanoimprint-lithograph...

They'll still probably require a good bit of operator and designer knowledge to work around whatever rough edges exist in the technology to keep yields high, assuming it works. It's still not a "plug it in, feed it blank wafers, press PRINT, and out comes finished chips!" kind of machine some here seem to think exist.




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