More than Moore litho

A dozen players are gunning for a top spot in the back-end lithography market. Previously, only Ultratech (now Veeco) and Rudolph (now Onto Innovation) were visible. Meanwhile, Canon, EV Group, Kulicke & Soffa, Nikon, Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment, Süss Microtec and several Chinese companies operating under the radar have also entered the arena.

An emerging tech trend in a billion-dollar market and companies capitalizing on it with different technologies – for a tech journalist like me, that’s heaven. I look back with pleasure on the nineties when AMD, Cyrix and IDT (with X86 architectures) and DEC (with its Alpha RISC architecture) challenged the hegemony of Intel. Intriguing was also the marathon ASML eventually won over Canon and Nikon.