Screen Holdings
More info
- Released
- 1943 (as Dainippon Screen)
- Type
- Semiconductor fabrication equipment
The Kyoto company that washes the wafer between every step — and that once took its name from the printing trade.
Screen Holdings went by Dainippon Screen until 2014 and was founded in Kyoto in 1943. Its roots are in photogravure and screen printing, hence the name, but its center of gravity has long been semiconductor gear: above all single-wafer cleaning and coater/developer tracks that apply and develop the photoresist around every lithography step.
Cleaning is invisible but unforgiving — a particle left on the surface becomes a defect when the next layer is written, and at EUV nodes the tolerances are so tight that a single speck can ruin a chip. Screen shares the cleaning market mainly with Tokyo Electron.