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10 or 7 isn't the issue, it's going past that.
https://www.asml.com/asml/show...

still heavily in the R&D phase

https://www.asml.com/products/...

The price has nothing to do with the lack of leverage for the fab. In semiconductors, there has been a massive consolidation of vendors as tools become more and more specialized (and thus far more expensive to design).

For example if you want to buy an immersion ArF lithography tool, you have exactly two vendors to choose from. Both 1 2 of these vendors will charge you tens of millions of dollars for a single tool, and both will make no promises about software upgrades, unless you pay for a service contract.

At the next generation if you want to buy an EUV lithography tool, you have exactly one vendor, with a nice long waiting list (of your competitors) to get a tool. So good luck trying to negotiate on the software patches for the PC attached to it. Also the last quote I heard about for one of these tools was actually over 100 Million USD.

450mm means that you end up with fewer incomplete chips on the edges of your wafer,

A standard die is 26x33 mm, which is much larger than the vast majority of the chips; most dies already contain multiple chips. Therefore, the edge loss is not as big a deal as you would think.

What is more of a cost saver is that most of the processing steps (applying photo resist, developing the resist, etching, ion implantation, annealing, and so on) are relatively easy to scale up to larger wafers, thereby reducing the process costs per unit of wafer area.

A big exception here is the lithography process, which gets significantly harder for bigger wafers, since it involves rapidly moving a wafer around with nanometer accuracy. A bigger wafer requires a bigger, stiffer, and therefore heavier wafer stage. ASML manufactures lithography tools that can do up to 175 wafers per hour (300 mm diameter) per hour, with an accuracy ("overlay") of 5.5 nm; that is about 3 dies per second. To give an idea of the scale: imagine that a vehicle is moving at 100 km/h, making multiple sharp turns per second, and tracks the ideal trajectory within 500 nm. And then the customer says: nice that you can do that with a sports car, but it's too small; can you build a heavy SUV that can do the same thing? (So there, a car analogy)

This is why Intel, TSMC, and Samsung have invested into ASML to speed up the development of 450 mm litho tools.

Disclosure: I work for ASML, but the above opinions are my own.

You should take this Intel announcement with a big handful of salt. Intel doesn't make the waver producing machinery, they get it from companies like ASML.

Now, there's been a big struggle between companies like Intel that wanted 450mm earlier, and the tool makers who sank a lot of money on the move to 300mm before and don't want to be burned again in the move to 450mm. The Intel announcement above was to put pressure on the tools providers. It didn't worked out in the end.

All this got sorted out between big boys recently, with Intel, TSMC and Samsung investing a lot of money in ASML to speed-up the availability of 450mm. But the accelerated roadmap has nothing to do with the announcement you quote, just look at it from ASML direct (slide 14). The 450mm process development tools are worked on starting mid-2015 and production equipment is available beginning of 2018. Exactly what is said in the TFA.

450mm is important as it is the only known step that will bring the cost of chips down. Other planned changes (finer processes, 3D chips...) increase performance but also cost. But 450mm requires huge upfront investments, so you need large volumes to recoup it and it will require a big upfront spending. Which is why a lot of people are pushing back. Intel has both high volumes, high margins and deep pockets so they're the most eager to get started. But as you can see, even with their backing it's not that simple and fast.

These could be leveraged further to give its x86 chips a boost vis-a-vis ARM. The other players need to pull their act together & pool resources to counter this.

Not necessarily. Once ASML has developed these technologies, they will be sold to all customers on equal terms. Moreover, unlike normal shareholders, Intel will not have voting rights and can therefore not easily influence the strategy of ASML. ASML's only obligation is that the R&D investment is allocated to development of said technologies. Other ASML customers (Intel competitors) are welcome to take a share in ASML on similar terms, so similar announcements from the competition may come during the next few months. You may want to read the official press releases.

You may be interested to know that ASML has 82% of the lithography market (by revenue), with equipment installed at most if not all manufacturers of CPUs and flash/DRAM memory. The semiconductor industry is driven by Moore's law; in a way, they are dependent on how fast ASML can develop equipment to produce ever smaller features. The interest of the ASML customers in this customer co-investment program is not so much in a competive advantage against each other, but rather to keep up with Moore's law.

Disclaimer: I work for ASML (in R&D), but the views above are my own, etc.

Something thats been in development for even 5 years and doesn't show any concrete signs of success should at least have alternatives developed for it. After 5 years if you still can't say for certain if its ever going to work, you definitely need to start looking in different directions.

You are misinformed. On our Alpha development machines, working 22 nm devices were already manufactured last year. (source) We are shipping the first commercial EUV lithography machines in the coming year (source, source) A problem for the chip manufacturers is that the capacity on the alpha machines is rather low and needs to be shared among competitors.

Yeah, I think the OP has a little intuition of the relatively common situation where an ailing older technology's flaws are somewhat obvious and well publicized for years and years, but the older technology staggers on far far longer than expected. For both the reason that EUV has been slow to mature, and that 193nm has been surprisingly resilient. It's wrong to conclude that EUV will never be practical, just that one should be very careful about declaring when it is necessary.

A similar situation is going on with the broader issue discussed here-- the eventual replacement of CMOS with some other technology. People are eager to declare the death of CMOS and the need for diamond substrates or nanotubes or whatever, but CMOS will stagger along much longer than the advocates of the new technologies hope because it is easier to extend CMOS than it is to make something truly different more mature and practical.

I deal with EUV lithography for a living. Not at Intel, but at ASML, the world's largest supplier of lithography machines and the only one that has actually manufactured working EUV lithography tools.

Something thats been in development for even 5 years and doesn't show any concrete signs of success should at least have alternatives developed for it. After 5 years if you still can't say for certain if its ever going to work, you definitely need to start looking in different directions.

You are misinformed. On our Alpha development machines, working 22 nm devices were already manufactured last year. (source) We are shipping the first commercial EUV lithography machines in the coming year (source, source) A problem for the chip manufacturers is that the capacity on the alpha machines is rather low and needs to be shared among competitors.

There is a temporary alternative; it is called double patterning (and triple patterning, etcetera). The first problem is that you need twice (thrice) as many process steps for the small features, and also proportionally more lithography machines that are not exactly cheap. The second problem is that double patterning imposes tough restrictions on the chip design; basically you can only make chips that consist mostly of repeating simple patterns. That is doable for memory chips, but much less so for CPUs. Moreover, if you want to continue Moore's law that way, the manufacturing cost will increase exponentially, so this is not a long-term viable alternative.

You can bet that the semiconductor manufacturers have looked for alternatives. But those don't exist, at least not viable ones.

I deal with EUV lithography for a living. Not at Intel, but at ASML, the world's largest supplier of lithography machines and the only one that has actually manufactured working EUV lithography tools.

Something thats been in development for even 5 years and doesn't show any concrete signs of success should at least have alternatives developed for it. After 5 years if you still can't say for certain if its ever going to work, you definitely need to start looking in different directions.

You are misinformed. On our Alpha development machines, working 22 nm devices were already manufactured last year. (source) We are shipping the first commercial EUV lithography machines in the coming year (source, source) A problem for the chip manufacturers is that the capacity on the alpha machines is rather low and needs to be shared among competitors.

There is a temporary alternative; it is called double patterning (and triple patterning, etcetera). The first problem is that you need twice (thrice) as many process steps for the small features, and also proportionally more lithography machines that are not exactly cheap. The second problem is that double patterning imposes tough restrictions on the chip design; basically you can only make chips that consist mostly of repeating simple patterns. That is doable for memory chips, but much less so for CPUs. Moreover, if you want to continue Moore's law that way, the manufacturing cost will increase exponentially, so this is not a long-term viable alternative.

You can bet that the semiconductor manufacturers have looked for alternatives. But those don't exist, at least not viable ones.

ASML in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, holds about 80% of the market and has been manufacturing 45 um wafersteppers for some time already news article 2005. Intel is one of their customers, so actually Veldhoven is the birthplace of the 45nm processors... At the moment they are down to 32 nm already...

The 65 nm wafer-steppers have been on the market for some time already. ASML is already delivering machines fortesting with 45 nm wafersteppers. The next downscaling is already planned so it seems...

The 65 nm wafer-steppers have been on the market for some time already. ASML is already delivering machines fortesting with 45 nm wafersteppers. The next downscaling is already planned so it seems...

ASML already sold an immersion litho machine half a year ago.

This technology has been in the works for some time, here are some relevant press releases from the three major litho tool vendors:
ASML
Canon
Nikon

Jacco (to e-mail me, please remove all yourclothes)
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# cd /var/log

Actually, this is not the only technology that promisses to bring lithography to even lower scales... There's also Lucent's Scalpel, Intel's Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) and an X-Ray technology from IBM. There all saying they're stuff is better that all other technologies... let's see which on comes first

Just as a bit of information on the side, this was shown at the International Solid State Circuits Conference. This is the yearly brag, boast, watch, learn and schmooz fest organized by the IEEE. It is a prestigious conference so everybody shows of their latest and greatest. Yesterday it was Intel with 1Ghz today it was AMD. It is not like this is in production allready, just guys showing off.

What I find interesting is that these are made by wafer-steppers from ASM-Lithography. These guys have been leading the way the last couple of years. I wonder how much Intel is being held back by sticking to their current wafer-stepper producer (Canon? or was it Nikon?)