Tunetheweb

Love me some FELs. Pretty sure they did try this, but determined it to be too large and costly for the technology of the time. https://www.asianometry.com/p/euv-lithography-but-with-a-free-electron https://www.euvlitho.com/2017/P18.pdf

Asianometry has a number of explainer videos on TSMC. I recommend them: https://www.asianometry.com/p/tsmc-briefly-explained

Carl Zeiss makes some amazing optics to allow it all to happen https://www.asianometry.com/p/how-carl-zeiss-crafted-a-house-of To quote: To make these EUV mirrors, each 2 to 4 nanometer layer of molybdenum and silicon has to be deposited one by one. Fifty times, without fatal defects. After that, each mirror has to be painstakingly polished. The acceptable surface deviation metric is 50 picometers, or 50 trillionths of a meter. That is a staggering number. To put that into perspective. 50 picometers on a mirror that is 450 millimeters wide. If that 450 millimeter mirror was blown up to the size of the United States, 4,500 kilometers or 2,800 miles wide, then 50 picometers would be just 0.5 mm tall.

As I understand it, the dynamics are similar to generic drugs where there is a large capital hurdle to new production facilities and a likelihood that prices will soon drop to a point that a new facility will lose money. https://www.asianometry.com/p/the-semiconductor-bust-still-coming

Alternate semiconductor materials (Graphene, SiC) could circumvent some of the expensive steps required for Si, but not all. Here's a good article about the unimaginably high purity standards for the water used in the industry: https://www.asianometry.com/p/the-purest-water-in-the-world The average fab uses about 2,000 gallons of ultrapure water each minute, 2-3 million gallons each day. Pipes and tubing are constantly shedding particles into flowing water - with random bursts that drive everyone crazy. Once the killer particle size limit ratcheted down to 20 nanometers - a limit we hit roughly about ten years ago - engineers realized that there existed no detection tool for consistently detecting sub-10 nanometer particles in low quantities.

Is EUV the only way? Isn't there a much slower technique with laser engraving, but which they may scale in some other way? https://www.asianometry.com/p/euv-lithography-but-with-a-free-electron

I don't think the YKK video is there yet but Jon also provides transcripts for many of his videos on his Substack, which might me more to your taste. Here is the one for the history of Intel and AMD. https://www.asianometry.com/p/intel-and-amd-the-first-30-years

The Fifth Generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Systems was another notable failure. OTOH MITI did also organise the Japanese VLSI project https://www.asianometry.com/p/the-rise-and-peak-of-japanese-semiconduc… https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/47985/fromimitationtoi0… , which was apparently a smashing success. (I am not an expert on anything.) On the third hand, according to Johnstone https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/bob-johnstone/we-were-burning/978046… the success of Japanese consumer electronics had very little to do with MITI and government industrial policy, as MITI despised the consumer-electronics firms and doted on the "real" computer companies. Right at the moment I assume that the Japanese government is probably still kicking itself for not spending whatever it took to keep Nikon's EUV-machine development going: apparently Nikon wasn't that far behind ASML. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_OOta7Y6Ik Likely it's determined not to make that mistake again; and it's not as if the US is in any position to complain about Japan having an activist industrial policy in semiconductors at the moment.