China developing domestic DUV tools was a near term certainty, not sure why the market is now repricing names. But more important than that i think the future of lithography isn’t going to be dominated by EUV anymore. Multi patterning, hybrid bonding, direct self assembly, etc. there are many other levers to pull if you want more performance for less cost. The Chinese companies/universities are leading the way in most of these areas. The American philosophy has always been to go bigger or throw more money at a problem but constraints breed innovation. You can look at Crash Bandicoot as an example of what innovation under constraints looked like. The original Play Station had only 2MB of RAM & 1 MB of VRAM and they were able to do 3D rendering, third person tracking camera, and dynamic levels all in 1996. I won’t go into all the work they did to pull this off but i say this all to say that i have a feeling we are going to experience a couple more “Crash Innovations” in the coming years. We will need to throw away a lot of the common wisdom of how things are supposed to be done and start thinking outside the box from now on.
