Tagged semiconductor equipment · show all articles
This cohort has profiled ASML, Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA, and Tokyo Electron individually. Here they are side by side — the complete map of who builds the equipment behind every chip in this cohort.
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.
No EUV lithography machine, no leading-edge chip — full stop. Every AI accelerator in this cohort exists because exactly one company in the world can build the tool that makes it possible.
ASML's next-generation lithography platform isn't a minor refinement. It's the specific technology that determines whether transistors keep shrinking past the current generation at all.
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.