Tokyo Electron
More info
- Released
- 1963
- Type
- Semiconductor equipment
TEL: Japan's largest maker of chip-fab tools, and the one that coats the wafer with photoresist before ASML's machine gets to expose it.
It started in Tokyo in 1963 as a trading house importing and selling American semiconductor equipment in Japan. In the 1980s it began building its own machines, and today TEL makes tools for etching, deposition and cleaning wafers — the same market as Applied Materials and Lam Research.
Its strongest position is in coater/developers, which apply and develop light-sensitive resist. In EUV lithography a TEL track is, in practice, always bolted to an ASML scanner — a near-monopoly that rarely gets mentioned. A merger with Applied Materials announced in 2013 was abandoned in 2015 under pressure from US antitrust regulators, who evidently thought it was worth stopping.