Lithography scanners aren't money printers; they print machines that keep doing work for years. Take a $100 bill. That same area of silicon is worth: ~$4,400 as TSMC 2nm logic ~$14,000 as DDR5 DRAM

PLP will be very disruptive to WFE and the industry in general. The substrate configuration is a big deal in semi, since it drives much of the economics. Here we're moving from round to square, which is a monumental change. On top of that, there's a wide array of panel sizes still trying to find their footing as the standard. We're already seeing big challenges on the litho side, with processing needs we just haven't encountered before.

Samsung's advanced EUV process leak mentions temperature and a solvent. There are 2 places this could be used, both for Metal Oxide Resist (MOR). Heated solvent developer has been published on for this, although AFAIK no benefit has been observed yet. And industry is leaning toward dry develop anyway which has clear benefits. Edge Bead Removal (EBR) for wet MOR. In the spin coat process, the photoresist at the edge of the wafer needs to be cleaned off in the track to prevent contamination of the robotics that grip the wafer. It's very hard to clean MOR with a solvent; it leaves trace metals behind. Since a single metal atom could kill a chip, this is a problem. There are 2 ways the industry is dealing with this now. One is a formulated EBR solvent plus an acid. It's unclear whether this will prove to be 100% reliable. The other is an expensive edge protection layer process that protects the wafer edge before MOR is coated. This is known to work, but it adds a lot of extra steps and cost. So a heated, formulated EBR chemical could also be used to enhance the first method. I've not seen anything on this yet; it would be a brand-new process tech.

Loyal customer: BorgWarner gave Wolfspeed half a bill for the expansion. That helped fund the overbuild, then Chapter 11. Wonder how the original capacity & pricing deal is aging.

Semitools for e-test are on fire rn. I think it may have been Claus that pointed out recently they were outperforming the rest of semitool. What's fundamentally driving this? 🤔

The DOE just added Helium to the critical materials list bc of its role in semiconductor manufacturing. We actually used to maintain a strategic reserve for this. The only other gas on the list is Fluorine.