Comment by mahirsaid
2 months ago
There will be a great tragedy to be had if that was ever a reality in the near future. The bigger questions is what if you forgot hot to make the machines that make the CPU's. That is the bigger challenge to overcome in this crisis. Only one company specializes in this field that gives big company's like TSMC Their abilities to manufacture great CPU's. The trick is to create the machine that makes them and go from there. 10nm - 2nm capabilities.
There is more to lithography than ASML catering to TSMC, Samsung, Intel.
There could be https://global.canon/en/technology/nil-2023.html &
https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoimprint-lithography
There also is https://www.searchforthenext.com &
https://semefab.com/
claiming to not need that ASML high-end stuff at all, to be competitive.
As reported around 2019 amongst many others like here:
https://eepower.com/new-industry-products/search-for-the-nex...
Maybe it's vaporware, because I'm unaware of anything 'big' produced there. Maybe it's only lack of funding,lack of trust because non-standard and 'unproven', inertia? Who knows?
And finally the forgotten minimal.fab by Yokogawa https://www.yokogawa.com/industries/semiconductor/minimal-fa...
https://www.minimalfab.com/en/ with no outrageous claims about structure size equivalence, but way faster turn-around times for prototyping, and none of the usually necessary investment in all that clean-room tech.
And not to forget the push and incentive China got as 'development help' to be independent :-)
I'm sure they're up to many interesting things in the near future.
In case more advanced nodes would disappear, even a semiconductor factory capable of producing eg. 200..500nm structures would already be very useful.
Remember the first 32-bit cpus were manufactured on >1um processes. Never mind 8-bitters or KB-sized memory chips.
Also note that IC designs, assembly programming & more, can be (and has been) done by hand. Having any kind of compute, no matter how slow by today's standards (couple MHz) helps a lot. Same for basic applications like text processing, spreadsheets, small databases, software development, etc etc.