Japan's Semiconductor Industry

Equipment

Japanese makers of front-end and back-end semiconductor equipment. Several of them hold leading global positions in a single process step, such as coat/develop, wafer cleaning, dicing or EUV mask inspection.

• Tokyo Electron (TEL)
  Coat/develop, etch and deposition equipment
• SCREEN Holdings
  Wafer cleaning, coat/develop and inspection equipment
• Advantest
  Automated test equipment (ATE) for SoC and memory
• DISCO
  Dicing, grinding and polishing equipment
• Lasertec
  EUV mask and mask blank inspection
• Kokusai Electric
  Batch deposition, diffusion and ALD equipment
• Ebara
  CMP systems, dry vacuum pumps and exhaust treatment
• Tokyo Seimitsu (ACCRETECH)
  Wafer probers, dicing and grinding machines, metrology

Materials

Silicon wafers, photoresists, CMP slurries and packaging materials. Japanese companies supply a large part of the world's semiconductor materials, which makes this the most Japan-specific layer of the supply chain.

• Shin-Etsu Chemical
  Silicon wafers, photoresists and photomask blanks
• SUMCO
  Silicon wafers
• JSR
  Photoresists and semiconductor materials
• Tokyo Ohka Kogyo (TOK)
  Photoresists and high-purity process chemicals
• Resonac
  CMP slurries, packaging materials and SiC epitaxial wafers

Chipmakers

Japanese companies that manufacture chips in their own fabs: a NAND flash maker and a new leading-edge logic foundry.

• Kioxia
  NAND flash memory and SSDs
• Rapidus
  Leading-edge logic foundry (2 nm, in development)

Sites by region

Japan's chip industry is not concentrated in one place. Kyushu hosts TSMC's JASM fab and many wafer and materials plants, Tohoku and Mie host NAND flash production, and Hokkaido is the home of Rapidus's new leading-edge fab. The list below shows the plants and sites of the companies covered here.