I suppose it depends what they're printing and why. There are plenty of structures that will want to be 180nm and larger for many years to come.
But I definitely agree that pretty soon it will make no sense to artificially limit printing resolution and, for high volume manufacturing, buying a new machine that can't do better than 180nm will make little sense.
TSMC is phasing out 180nm officially already for 2 years due to demand on more advanced nodes like 65nm or 40nm. All the BCD stuff is implemented on those processes too. They are moving the equipment used in 180nm to these newer nodes. I think they don't want anything laeger than 110nm.
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I suppose it depends what they're printing and why. There are plenty of structures that will want to be 180nm and larger for many years to come.
But I definitely agree that pretty soon it will make no sense to artificially limit printing resolution and, for high volume manufacturing, buying a new machine that can't do better than 180nm will make little sense.
TSMC is phasing out 180nm officially already for 2 years due to demand on more advanced nodes like 65nm or 40nm. All the BCD stuff is implemented on those processes too. They are moving the equipment used in 180nm to these newer nodes. I think they don't want anything laeger than 110nm.