John West

Over the past 5 years, suppliers of chillers have shined as standout performers. These cooling systems get little attention, yet revenues have more than doubled, clocking a compound annual growth rate of 22% to reach $635 million in 2021, way above industry average growth of 13.3%.

Vacuum pumps, pressure gauges, and vacuum valves combined make up the biggest expense on the bill of materials for semiconductor OEMs. The semiconductor industry consumed almost $2.7 billion worth of vacuum subsystems in 2020, with over 60% supplied by vendors based in Europe.

Sales of process power and reactive gas subsystems for semiconductor manufacturing equipment are on track to achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23% between 2016 and 2021 – far outpacing the critical subsystems industry average of 16.4% due to multiple positive factors.

VLSI Research announced the list of top suppliers of critical subsystems to the semiconductor industry in 2020. The data shows that companies supplying products to chipmakers for use in the sub-fab had a good year, but those providing products directly to OEMs had an outstanding year.

Sales of critical subsystems for use in semiconductor manufacturing equipment will exceed $12.2 billion in 2020, a 6% increase over the previous record of $11.5 billion reached in 2018. What makes this such a remarkable feat is they achieved this despite unprecedented disruptions to the supply...

The historic and forecast growth trends for cleanroom robots are in line with the long-term growth rates of semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

COVID-19 has forced all the players in the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain to reassess how much inventory they need to hold.

Despite a tough year for critical subsystem suppliers, their overall expenditure on R&D has remained at near record levels– evidence that critical subsystems are indeed critical to the semiconductor manufacturing equipment industry and that high R&D spending on these products is essential.

Driven by the increased complexity of leading edge fabs and the growing vacuum intensity of semiconductor manufacturing, both the volume and the value of critical subsystems for this part of the market is on the rise.