Canon has been working on an alternative path that would replace all of EUV lithography with effectively stamping patterns on the wafer… Could cut costs but would no doubt be a LONG time to switch over. I could see China being very interested 
In September, Canon shipped the first commercial version of a technology that could one day upend the making of the most advanced silicon chips. Called nanoimprint lithography (NIL), it’s capable of patterning circuit features as small as 14 nanometers—enabling logic chips on par with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia processors now in mass production.
The NIL system offers advantages that may challenge the US $150 million machines that dominate today’s advanced chipmaking, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography scanners. If Canon is correct, its machines will eventually deliver EUV-quality chips at a fraction of the cost.
The company’s approach is entirely different to EUV systems, which are made exclusively by Netherlands-based ASML. The Dutch company uses a complex process that starts with kilowatt-class lasers blasting molten droplets of tin into a plasma that glows with a 13.5 nanometer wavelength. This light is then steered through a vacuum chamber by specialized optics and bounced off a patterned mask onto a silicon wafer to fix the pattern onto the wafer.
In contrast, Canon’s system, which was shipped to Defense Department-backed R&D consortium the Texas Institute for Electronics, seems almost comically simple. Put simply, it stamps the circuit pattern onto the wafer.
NIL starts with a process that’s like photolithography’s. It writes a pattern on a “mask” using a focused beam of electrons. In EUV, this pattern is captured on a mirror and is then reflected onto the silicon. But in NIL, a so-called master mask, or mold, made of quartz is used to create multiple replica masks also made of quartz.
The replica mask is then pressed directly onto surface of a wafer, as though it were a stamp, that’s been coated with a liquid resin called a resist. Ultraviolet light from a mercury lamp—the kind used in chipmaking back in the 1970s—is then applied to solidify the resin and allow the mask to be removed from the wafer. Thus the same pattern from the master mask is stamped onto the resist on the silicon. And just as in photolithography-based chipmaking, that pattern guides the series of etching, deposition, and other processes needed to create transistors and interconnects.
“This looks to be a simple yet clever method for advancing light-source-free nanolithography capable of high-accuracy patterning,” says Ahmed Hassanein, leader of the Center for Materials Under Extreme Environment at Purdue University in Indiana, and an expert in EUV light sources. “The system also has the advantage that it uses less power and should be cheaper to purchase and operate compared to EUV systems.”
Canon claims that, compared to EUV, this direct contact method requires fewer steps and tools, resulting in a simpler process that’s less costly to operate. For instance, compared to an EUV system employing a 250-watt light source, Canon estimates NIL consumes just one-tenth the energy.
…>
Canon have produced a relatively straightforward lithography process. It begins by creating a master mask. Like other photolithography masks, this is made by etching a pattern using electron-beam lithography. The master mask size is 152 by 152 millimeters, and the patterning area of the master mask—which contains the raised patterns of the circuit design to be printed—measures 26 by 33 mm.
From this master mask, multiple replica masks with recessed patterns are fabricated. Each replica mask can then produce up to 80 lots, with each lot comprising 25 wafers. So one replica can make one layer of circuitry for 2,000 wafers.
To illustrate NIL’s lower cost of ownership, Iwamoto compares it with an advanced argon fluoride immersion lithography system—the predecessor to EUV lithography and still in wide use—set up for producing a dense array of 20-nm-wide contact holes. For the same output, an NIL system working at 80 wafer-per-hour (wph) can reduce cost of ownership by 43 percent, says Iwamoto. And Canon is targeting a 100-wph scheme capable of producing 340 lots per replica mask by further reducing particulate contamination, improving the quality of the resist, and refining and optimizing the NIL workflow. Achieving this, cost-of-ownership versus immersion lithography would drop to 59 percent, Iwamoto estimates.