@tonyget, do you think the iLine price tag is too high for a SSB800?
SSB800 at no less than 50M RMB seems quite expensive for a front end iLine system. But it’s not a surprise the system price is so high considering what UPrecision is reportedly charging for the DWS stage.
With the current exchange rate, you could get a Canon FPA5550 iZ2 for <25M RMB that’s at least 50% more productive. Even ASML iLine could be had at ~35M RMB.
What is panning out is an interesting anomaly.
Usually a newcomer starts with the entry level and gradually goes up to advanced level machines.
But because of
1. Price/productivity of SMEE is not competitive at entry level i-line machines
2. If there will be a ban, it will be for immersion litho, not for mature nodes
3. ICRD is testing the Arf dry version for a reason. it is more critical than the i-line or the Krf
By 2024 we could have just a small bunch of SMEE i-line machines in production (or at least assumed as such), that mainly are used to debug the software and the machine's general functionality and reliability...and this requires a lot of time to polish.
But the real numbers of SMEE machines will be in the dry Arf and later in the immersion Arf, where they will grow faster...inheriting all the software improvements that in the meantime are debugged out on the i-line machines.
In 2/3 years time we could have in the market many more SMEE Arf and Arfi machines than the lower level Krf and i-line. That would be quite odd but is a real possibility.
