[craigjb]

You also need hundreds of other machines from Applied Materials, KLA Tencor, Lam Research, Tokyo Electron, etc. Then, years of process development R&D: what temperature do we bake this layer at, how long, what profile, what atmosphere in the tool… Every process step has a large parameter set to optimize. Creating a process is a painstaking many many variable optimization slog.

Just wanted to add that since I see people only mention ASML often here. They are very important, but there is so much more to TSMC’s success.