Sub-system
Leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing is concentrated in a small number of locations, and the equipment that makes it possible is subject to export restrictions in several jurisdictions. Both are facts about the supply chain that no technical improvement changes.
In one sentence
Export controls on semiconductors are government restrictions on the transfer of specified manufacturing equipment, design software and advanced chips to particular destinations, applied alongside subsidies intended to relocate capacity.
The concentration is a consequence of economics, not policy: leading-edge fabs cluster where the supplier ecosystem, the trained workforce and the utilities already exist, and each new fab makes that location more attractive for the next. Building the same capability elsewhere means building the ecosystem too, which is slower and more expensive than the fab itself.
On top of that sits regulation. Several governments restrict the export of advanced manufacturing equipment, design software and high-performance chips, and because the equipment supply chain crosses several countries, controls in any one of them affect what can be shipped. Companies respond by segmenting products by destination, which adds engineering and compliance cost and fragments what was a single global market.
A fab depends on hundreds of nearby suppliers of chemicals, gases, parts, calibration and maintenance services, and on engineers who have run these processes before. Subsidies can fund a building and its tools. They cannot immediately produce the surrounding network, which is why announced projects routinely take longer than planned.
Restrictions apply to categories of equipment and to chips above defined performance thresholds, and extend to foreign-made goods produced using controlled technology. In practice this means the equipment makers, not only the chip makers, are the enforcement point — and that a rule in one jurisdiction reaches equipment assembled in another.
Restricted markets invest in domestic alternatives, particularly at mature nodes where the technical barrier is lower. Suppliers lose a market and redirect capacity. Buyers hold larger inventories against policy risk. None of these are the intended effect, and all of them change the supply picture in ways that persist.
3 of these are marked as a chokepoint: a handful of qualified suppliers, a multi-year lead time, or a single geography.
The equipment chain spans several countries, so what can ship depends on the intersection of several countries' rules.
A fab without nearby chemical, gas, parts and service suppliers runs at higher cost and lower reliability.
Experienced staff are the scarcest input in a new region and cannot be trained on the timescale of a construction project.
The rules are written around this equipment class above all others, and the manufacturer is where they are enforced. What one company may ship is most of what the controls actually do.
EUV lithographyOther pages in this map that name Geography and controls as something they cannot do without.
Whether subsidised capacity outside the current concentration reaches competitive cost and yield.
Whether control thresholds move often enough to make product planning difficult for suppliers.
Whether restricted markets reach self-sufficiency at mature nodes and what that does to global pricing there.
Each page explains one technology in plain language, states what it depends on, and names companies by what they supply at that step. Company roles are described qualitatively and deliberately carry no market shares, revenue figures or rankings — those change faster than an explainer can, and a stale number is worse than none. Ticker links point at company pages on this site and are provided for reference only.
Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or a forecast. A company named on a page about a technology is not thereby a good investment, and the chokepoints described are structural facts about supply chains rather than predictions about prices. Technology moves; where a page describes something as unresolved or in development, that was true when it was written.
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