Semiconductors: how a chip is actually made

A chip passes through five broadly separate industries on its way to existing. Software companies supply the tools it is designed with and the blocks it is assembled from. A fab prints and builds it over several hundred process steps. A packaging operation joins it to other dies and to memory. Materials suppliers feed all of it with consumables of extraordinary purity. And test decides what is sold.

Reading the chain this way makes the concentration visible, and the concentration is the point. One company makes the machines that print the smallest features. One optical manufacturer makes their lenses. Three companies make high-bandwidth memory. Essentially one supplies the film that high-end package substrates are built from. A handful of Japanese chemical firms supply the photoresists. None of these are market-share observations — they are counts of qualified suppliers.

The other thing the chain explains is where value has moved. Packaging was the cheap step at the end for decades and is now the constraint on the industry's most valuable products. Metrology grew from a support function into a large business because process complexity outran the ability to control it by recipe. The stages have not changed; what they are worth has.

Each page below explains its step, states what it depends on, and names who supplies it. The dependency links run both up into the AI branch that consumes this output and down into the materials that make it possible.