Brianhayes: ASML has the effective monopoly of immersion ArF as well (they sell about 70 a year, Nikon a handful if they are lucky) and the immersion monopoly is just accepted well in the industry. Nobody is complaining about ASML as far as such complaints would reach SemiWiki's forum. The barrier to entry in immersion-litho is simply infinity on the life time of a Semi-manager...
In my opinion it has nothing to do with monopoly. Simply tool availability with sufficient source power for the industry to work on the other EUV issues. The whole other 'EUV-infrastructure' was waiting for this to happen, and that kick-off started about 1.5 year ago (Summer 2014) when Robert Maire called the IBM EUV results with 40 Watt source power bogus:
EUV Results Bogus, Says Analyst | EE Times
The industry `registered` that verdict of Mr. Maire and since then the industry stepped up the efforts on pellicles, resist, mask blanks etc........ Nothing to do with monopoly....
Now we are in `the stochastics land of LER`, much more interesting to see how that get's `solved`....
User NL