Applied Materials
More info
- Creator
- Michael McNeilly
- Released
- 1967
- Headquarters
- Santa Clara, California
The equipment maker behind nearly everything in a chip fab except the lithography itself.
Founded in 1967, Applied Materials is one of the world's largest makers of semiconductor equipment. While ASML owns the exposure step, Applied sells most of the rest: machines that lay thin films onto the wafer (CVD, PVD), etch them away again, implant dopants and polish the surface flat between passes.
Every new node needs more of those steps, so the company profits from chips getting more complicated no matter who wins the race between TSMC, Samsung and Intel. A merger with Japan's Tokyo Electron, announced in 2013, was abandoned in 2015 after objections from competition regulators.