Asianometry YouTube channel did a few really good videos on chip fabbing and the unique challenges. Scale is addressed IIRC. Highly recommend.
If you have a way to churn them out please let Zeiss SMT know.
What in the process wouldn’t work with this method?
Presumably a lot of the machinery needed to build these components is incredibly specialized too. That machinery won't be purchasable off the shelf. It will be ordered custom with long lead times, and (again!) could have bottlenecks in production that make it simply impossible to deliver in large quantities.
I'd bet (with no supporting evidence, just a gut feeling) that this industry needs to know five years in advance what the demand for chips in a given process node is going to be just to set up the supply chains to manufacture the right number of lithography machines. If that estimate is wrong, it'll take so long to build up that infrastructure that you might as well not bother, and just try to get things right for the next node.
For example, the mirror might require extremely high purity silica, made in a top-notch cleanroom environment. To produce 2x, you don't just need 2x the raw material, you need 2x the air filtration systems, purifying machines, trained staff.
Which is fine, that large footprint can be doubled! But maybe this whole process is only going to be state-of-the-art for 5 years, and after that won't command top dollar.
Testing of EUV lithography machines is very complicated and slow process. You cannot scale it without magically cloning all the test engineers and technicians.
Making a super-flat mirror is extremely difficult and requires state-of-the-art facilities, and state-of-the-art equipment. And highly trained, experienced employees. And there aren't enough of any of that to scale rapidly.
It's not just about scaling 1 input. You have to scale the entire supply chain.
i.e. they need to project out demand x years in advance because their things are expensive and slow to build, and their components vendors have the same problem with the additional problem that their components vendors only have one customer for some of their products: them.
There is no other equivalent use for much of what they need so if they fuck it up they've got too much equipment too fast.
This is a classic hardware business problem.
Even if it was possible to double the production for free in a year then without new orders when this come online you only have 50 orders left to process ...
If you look some plane production backorders are in the decade I believe atm. Looking at the A320 orders you can see how they ramp up production (and this ramp up might production line switching from aircraft type not new lines) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A320neo_famil...
