alt Hacker NewsBut then you are assuming the current way is optimal. Why can’t we have a 3d-printer-style contraption for chips?
If people have millions of new chip designs that need making, perhaps that will be motivation to invent a new way of making chips. It might not be better at manufacturing a billion of the same chip, but maybe it’s better at producing a billion different chips. Then every HFT could have their own chip and people could try out all kinds of new designs without committing a fortune.
Think how long it takes for a 3D printer to finish a single design with 0.1mm resolution. Now scale that down to 10nm. The time to complete goes up by 10^12. A 1 minute design would scale to 2M years.
There's a reason e-beam lithography is only used to make masks, and why it's one of the most expensive parts of the manufacture.