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Self-aligned litho was a hype when I was in litho more than a decade ago. Seems it did not live up to it's promise even for very regular structures like NAND flash.
Before the chip squeeze during COVID TSMC did revise their prices regurlarly and they always went down. The price hike during that time has been the only exception I know of and surprised all in the field I know.
More recent nodes typically get more price decrease even in relative terms (e.g. %)...
Nice thing about open source stuff is that it does not really matter what is actually written in the standards, just how people commonly use it. E.g. like Linux following (in the beginning) POSIX mostly but not all.
Problem is that a semiconductor fab is not one long chain of machines after each but that the same tools are used for different steps in the processing of a lot. And these are not only wafer processing tools but alos metrology like CD-SEM, ellipsometry, etc. Problem is that the cycles in between...
I have been working @ imec in the lithography group. Typically resist development starts on so-called small-field litho machines at sites like imec. These machines have a much smaller projection field than production machines but can already be used for resist development. Sometimes these...
In semiconductors everything is about yield. If you do your own multi-foundry chiplet design and have a yield problem it's your own problem to solve. If you use a foundry provided chiplet solution they see yield problems as a problem for them to solve.
As far as I know throughput of maskless ebeam is in hours/days per wafer rather than wafers per hour; especially for resolutions for which EUV is used.
You seem to confuse Trademark law with Copyright or Contract law. Wether you protected other IP or not before does not impact in any way how you can protect new unrelated IP.
Yes, I also remember this paper, I think it was from TSMC. If I remember correctly this was based on the MAPPER lithography machines that were on development at that time. The plan was to use an array of hundreds (if not thousands) tips as e-beam generators. It was fascinating technology but I...
