4DS will never reach 10nm because that is not their goal.IMEC...

4DS will never reach 10nm because that is not their goal.

IMEC was set up as a joint R&D facility because all the semiconductor manufacturers realised they couldn't have their own research fabs. Unless your commercial fab isn't burning, it's not earning and research requires a lot of stop and start.

So they all got together and set up IMEC in Belgium, just up the road from ASML where the bleeding edge fabricating machines they use are designed and built. IMEC gets the first machine of each type, which then gets used to conduct development.

They agreed on testing platforms and routines that would allow them to assess the performance of new technologies. All this is standardised to provide a level playing field to assess new tech on.

Those platforms wouldn't be at 10nm because you can guarantee each semiconductor company manufacturing at that node size would have a lot of protected IP in their BEOL layers. So they probably took it back to 60nm where nobody had to give up their secret sauces, yet they could still be confident in the results.

However, when whoever picks up 4DS has something to develop at a smaller node size with their proprietary control layers, the development fabrication runs will happen at IMEC again, because they can't stop their own gear to develop their products. The results of that dev will be kept under wraps until a product is ready for sale.