Currently, only one company in the world – ASML – has the technological capability necessary for the creation of photolithography machines which are sufficient for the production of modern semiconductor devices. What I’m wondering is at what point does semiconductor manufacturing become practical, or even feesible for small organizations, or independents? One must be able to surpass the cost of the machines, and the resources necessary to manufacture them. I presume that a company like ASML is also extremely picky – willfully, or by regulation, or otherwise – about who they lend their technology to.
I’m not sure if this is the right community for this sort of post. Please let me know if not, and if there is a more suitable place to put it.
Realistically, you can’t really compete in a market where ASML is the monopolist. Not because ASML is an ass, but simply because building just a single factory costs billions. Intel regularly invests 10 billion or more in just a single factory that doesn’t even have all the necessary tools in-house to produce a chip end to end.
Smaller manufacturers usually serve the long tail, that is rather old process nodes for use cases where bleeding edge performance isn’t needed. Bosch for example had its own manufacturing branch.
Also bleeding-edge processes mean smaller, thinner gates. That’s what gives them the fast switching speeds, but it reduces the max allowable voltage. For parts that need to handle more than 1.8V or so a modern 5nm process will just end up using bigger gates than the process is optimized for. May as well go with an older process (bigger minimum gate size) that’s better suited to switching the voltage needed. For Bosch (automotive parts, power tools, etc) they’re making a lot of parts with really big output transistors (switching 14V, 48V, etc) and not super high-performance processors.
The big disadvantage with particularly old processes is that they used smaller wafers. So fewer chips per wafer processed, meaning lower overall yields and higher price/chip. The switch from 200mm wafers to 300mm in 1999 meant the wafer area increased by a factor of 2.25! 300mm wafers also required fully-automated factories due to the weight of a wafer carrier (a front opening wafer pod, or FOUP, is 7-9kg when loaded with 25 wafers), which save on labor costs. So processes older than 1999 (around the 180nm node) are sometimes not worth it even for power electronics.