A chip-making powerhouse is reborn in Japan

TOKYO – In a mark of the AI boom times, Japan’s Kokusai Electric is building its first new in-country factory in 35 years.

Kokusai competes with Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron in the markets for Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD), Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) and other thermal process and plasma treatment equipment used to form nanoscale thin films for the fabrication of integrated circuits (ICs) on silicon wafers.

The company has reemerged as a top maker of semiconductor production equipment after a successful spin-off from the Hitachi Group led by US private equity firm KKR.

While Kokusai is much smaller than Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron in terms of total sales, it commands high market shares in its key products – about 70% in batch ALD and 34% in batch CVD in 2023, according to market research organization Gartner.

Kokusai’s target applications include AI processors and other advanced logic ICs, the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used with AI processors, 3D NAND flash memory and silicon carbide power devices.

“As semiconductor devices have become three-dimensional and more complex in recent years,” Kokusai explains, “the surface of wafers has become more complex. This, in turn, has increased demand for highly difficult deposition.”

Examples include the ever-rising number of layers in 3D NAND, the Gate All Around (GAA) transistors introduced with 3nm process technology and the Complementary Field-Effect Transistor (CFET) architecture being developed by nanoelectronics R&D organization imec for use at process nodes below 1nm envisioned at the end of the decade.

Kokusai also has also secured a hefty presence in the market for mature logic IC thermal processing equipment, first in Japan and China, and now in