Tagged chip manufacturing · show all articles
Coat, bake, develop, clean — the unglamorous thermal and chemical processing that has to happen between lithography, etch, and deposition, every single time. Tokyo Electron built its business on that connective tissue.
Applied Materials builds layers up. Lam Research carves them back down — the etch step that turns a deposited film into an actual working circuit pattern, and its own genuinely hard engineering problem.
Deposition builds the layer. Etch cuts the pattern. Neither step tells you whether it worked. That's KLA's job — inspection and metrology, the unglamorous layer that decides what actually ships.
A finished wafer isn't a sellable product. Someone still has to cut it, package it, and test it — and the largest company doing that job, ASE Technology, holds nearly half the entire advanced-packaging market.
ASML gets the attention because it has no competitor. Applied Materials' job is just as essential and far less understood: depositing the precise atomic layers every chip is actually built from.