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Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

OP states that this can go down to 14nm. What I am interested in is whether older and larger processes (say ~50nm) can be done at a much cheaper cost than traditional methods.

A lot of stuff simply does not require the most advanced chips.

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Canon has been selling nanoprint litography machines for a long time.

FPA-1200NZ2C came out 2015-2016. Press release from a sale 2017 https://global.canon/en/news/2017/20170720.html

The answer almost certainly is no. While lithography is one of the largest single contributor to manufacturing costs, the contribution to overall cost is still far below 10%.

And one cannot simply substitute an optical lithography with a nano imprint machine without redesigning some part of the process (etch, metrology etc.).

Investing R&D resources for a (best case) 10% reduction in costs while still having a decent probability of failure in a big but declining node is not worth it.

Note that 14nm processes (which are quite old by now) are not the same as 14nm feature sizes. I'm not sure what these machines are capable of, since some details may well be lost in translation in this kind of publication. And I'm only an interested enthusiast, I don't work in the field directly.

But towards the end of the article they talk of targeting 8nm line width in 2028, which is impressive. Maybe this time around NIL actually becomes real for high-end processes?

These numbers are all mindboggling. I understand that the modern specs for EUV dont mean wire width, but if with this future NIL we truly get down to 8nm wide wires, perhaps we should start counting the number of atoms across the width of the wire (around 30).

These are feature sizes. (Comparable to the 13.5 nm of EUV)

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