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To put rough numbers to this:

1.5B transistors in a current intel core chip

300 die per wafer

150 wafers an hour

That means each litho tool prints 6.75 x 10^13 “transistors” per hour. In more useful units, that’s 18.75B transistors per second.

Drawing them one line at a time is technically feasible but…I’ll bet you are talking single digit DIE per hour if that.

And that is for one layer of lithography. I’ve seen estimates from 5-20 layers of lithography using EUV tools at the 3-7nm nodes. So the time scale is even more warped.



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