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Semiconductor Equipment & Materials

Equipment and materials used to fabricate semiconductors — wafer fabrication, inspection and metrology tools, cleanroom equipment, lithography photomasks, electronic materials and process chemicals (including CMP slurries and pads), silicon wafers and polysilicon feedstock, advanced packaging (including hybrid bonding and through-silicon via processes) and OSAT, semiconductor test equipment and probe cards, EDA software, foundry and fab services, and compound semiconductor epitaxy.

Product categories in Semiconductor Equipment & Materials

  • Advanced Packaging — 2.5D/3D packaging, CoWoS, chiplets, fan-out wafer-level packaging
  • Cleanroom Equipment — Cleanroom systems, filtration, and contamination control
  • CMP Slurries & Pads — Materials for chemical mechanical planarization to polish wafers flat.
  • Compound Semiconductor Epitaxy — Epitaxial wafer manufacturing for compound semiconductors — III-V materials (GaAs, GaN, InP) and IV-IV SiC — grown by MOCVD, MBE, or CVD onto native or engineered substrates. Serves wireless RF (GaAs/GaN HEMTs, PAs, filters), optoelectronics (VCSELs, DFB lasers, photodiodes, LEDs), power electronics (SiC and GaN switches for EVs, chargers, PV inverters, datacenter PSUs), and sensing (LiDAR, imaging).
  • EDA Software — Electronic design automation tools for chip design and verification
  • Electronic Materials — Substrates, sputtering targets, bonding wires for electronics
  • Foundry / Fab Services — Contract semiconductor manufacturing — wafer fabrication for fabless and partially-fabless customers, spanning leading-edge logic, mature-node analog/mixed-signal, RF, and specialty processes (BCD, BiCMOS, SiC, SOI).
  • Hybrid Bonding Equipment — Direct copper-to-copper bonding without solder microbumps — the next-generation stacking interconnect for HBM5+ and high-end logic-on-logic 3D integration. Enables sub-1µm pitches versus 25-40µm for thermocompression bonding (TCB), allowing 20-Hi+ HBM stacks and TSMC SoIC. Wafer-to-wafer (W2W) hybrid bonding is expected to become mainstream in the HBM5 generation (~2028-2029); die-to-wafer (D2W) for higher mix. Equipment is concentrated at BE Semiconductor (BESI), ASMPT, and Applied Materials, with EV Group and SUSS Microtec on the prep side.
  • OSAT — Outsourced semiconductor assembly and test services
  • Photomasks & Reticles — Mask blanks and patterning for semiconductor lithography
  • Polysilicon — High-purity polycrystalline silicon feedstock, the foundational raw material for solar PV wafers.
  • Probe Cards & Test Sockets — Wafer probe cards and IC test sockets
  • Process Chemicals & Gases — Specialty chemicals, photoresists, CMP slurries, and process gases
  • Semiconductor Test Equipment — ATE (automatic test equipment) for chip testing (Teradyne, Advantest)
  • Silicon Wafers — Raw silicon wafer manufacturing and supply
  • Through-Silicon Via (TSV) Process — Through-Silicon Via (TSV) is the vertical copper interconnect that passes through silicon dies to enable 3D stacking — the foundational technology that makes HBM physically possible. The full TSV process flow adds ~19 materials-engineering steps on top of the ~700 steps for standard DRAM and spans deep silicon etching, oxide liner deposition, barrier and seed layer PVD, electrochemical copper fill, CMP, wafer thinning, and double-sided processing. Equipment-side concentrated at Applied Materials (TSV etch + drill-and-fill, ~75% process-step coverage), Lam Research (deep silicon etch, multi-year SK hynix deal), and Tokyo Electron. The wafer-thinning and dicing duopoly sits with Disco and Tokyo Seimitsu/Accretech.
  • Wafer Fabrication Equipment — Lithography, deposition, etch, and other fab equipment
  • Wafer Inspection & Metrology — Defect inspection, CD-SEM, overlay measurement tools

Related macro trends

  • Advanced Semiconductor Packaging
  • High Bandwidth Memory

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