InchFab ships a $5M-15M shipping-container-sized clean room that does lithography, dry etch, CVD, ALD, and wet processes on 4-inch wafers down to 0.5 micron feature size. The constraint being removed is not feature size. It is the 12-18 month lead time and $50K-$200K minimum spend to route a custom specialty chip through a contract R&D fab.
The market this unlocks is not the leading-edge logic that TSMC and Samsung dominate. It is the long tail of MEMS sensors, photonic chips, compound semiconductors, power devices, and custom microsystems where 0.5 micron is more than enough and where the bottleneck has always been access, not process capability. InchFab already has customers on multiple continents, most of them running workforce development programs ahead of planned new fabs or doing prototype runs that would otherwise require outsourcing to university fabs with equipment from 1985.
The validation loop for a custom MEMS design or a photonic waveguide structure just compressed from months to days for teams that can afford a $5M capital purchase. That is a real shift in who gets to iterate fast on specialty silicon. The losers are contract R&D fabs charging $150K and six-month lead times for the same 0.5 micron process capability. Expect those fabs to respond on price before 2028, or cede the prototype and small-volume market entirely.