Thinking about it naively, I can guess at a few possibilities:
- it's highly labor-intensive
- it requires highly specialized skills that command incredibly high prices on the labor market
- it requires lots of prototyping iterations that require expensive materials
- the prototypes are produced on machinery with high opportunity costs
- IP licensing costs
I'm wondering if one of these in particular is the dominant cause, or if it's all of them in conjunction, or if there are other major factors I'm not thinking of.
I think those design costs are nonsensical. There are major projects done by groups of 100 or fewer engineers. A really unique design can cost that much, but a licensed design built.on standard cells is less. That is how rocketchip, RiscV, and others get by. As an approximation, every M$ is 2 engineer years. A 100M$ design is...200 engineer years. With an ARM license and other IP, that is likely manageable.
There is a large infrastructure of design tools that keep design costs constrained per design. Fab costs are not so easily limited....
Also, figuring out how to maximize yields to an acceptable level must be a lot of experimentation.
- EUV comes from a plasma of metal created in a vacuum chamber.
- the plasma is created by concentrating a beam of light on a tiny pellet of molten metal
- that beam of light is a 25kw laser, which is borderline weapons-grade. To the point that countries hesitate to even allow it to be imported.
- the laser must be pulsed precisely to vaporize the metal as its flying through the chamber
- residue from the metal vapor quickly builds up and deteriorates the process
getting this stuff to work requires armies of engineers and scientists. the machines themselves are the size of a tour bus.
At these scales, very few players can afford to play, even if a breakthrough could net you a very comfortable position for many years.