Needing quad with EUV inst impressive at all. Everyone can roughly do that now.
I only just skimmed this thread, so apologies if this has already been discussed, but the quad-patterning w/EUV was a misprint by IBM. It is single-pattern w/EUV but they can get the same results (allegedly) with a more expensive quad-patterning integration using traditional immersion-litho.
In general though, this is an R&D milestone no different than what every other process tech development team is going through all over the planet. What is different here is that IBM elected to showcase their achieving this milestone in such a public fashion.
And IMO the reason why they did so is clear - it is imperative that IBM demonstrate to their shareholders that the decision to gift $1.5B, 2 fabs, and 16,000 patents to GloFo whilst retaining their R&D labs was a decision that does not prevent or undermine IBM's applied research efforts.
But we've seen these sorts of premature "we did it!" press releases from IBM before, 45nm HKMG being one of them. And the management is still the same, so don't expect much more behind this press release than what came from all the others before it.
The good news is that in this day and age one can truthfully say that if IBM can do it then so too can practically everyone else who is in the running to produce a 7nm logic node. And that means good news for us customers of low-cost foundry providers the likes of UMC and SMIC, not to mention TSMC and Samsung who are most assuredly well past this milestone in their own internal 7nm development efforts (but have no need to get the press releases out to sate their shareholders as IBM does).
Not trying to understate the significance or relevance of IBM's integration efforts. Just saying that there isn't really anything revolutionary or groundbreaking here. Everyone is doing the same thing in R&D, but as we saw with Intel's 14nm the deal-killer is ramping these nodes to yield entitlement.
If you don't get the yield then you don't get the chips into the market, at which point it didn't make a difference when you accomplished xyz in R&D. So I will reserve my excitement for the press release detailing something about yield results or something akin to a solid production timeline. If I want to see super-cool transistor results from R&D labs then the IBM press release definitely meets that, but I'd rather see a chip I can buy that uses said super-cool transistors.