Technical notes and assessments. Every claim comes with its primary source.
Turning, milling, and drilling all cut with a pre-made edge — and the limit is not "sharpen the tool a bit." Tool-nose radius sets the ripple, edge radius sets the minimum chip, temperature makes the machine itself grow, and a silicon atom spacing is about 425,000 times smaller than a 0.1 mm end mill. Chip patterns and EUV optical surfaces are therefore not made by cutters.
A drawing that says 10 μm or 1 μm is asking about the finished part. ISO 230-2 positioning accuracy A describes a single axis only: an uncompensated 3-axis miller measured 20–33 μm on X; after compensation single-axis A fell to 1.3–1.7 μm while the two-axis ballbar positioning tolerance stayed around 10–13 μm. This article maps the two tolerance levels onto two published machine tests.