One market researcher estimated that this would result in a 10 percent unit cost savings over megafabs because fixed costs, such as software for monitoring and automation, can be spread out over the larger output and because production bottlenecks from equipment failure are less likely to arise as a result of the increased redundancy of each type of equipment.4 However, even as the unit costs go down, the fixed costs of building fabs have skyrocketed and resulted in fabs that must operate constantly at extremely high volumes to be profitable.
