Lam Research

Lam Research Corporation is a leading manufacturer and supplier of process equipment and systems for the semiconductor industry. Among the company's products mainly include equipment for dry etching of various materials. Thus, Lam Research is in competition with other equipment suppliers to the semiconductor industry such as Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron and Dainippon Screen Manufacturing. Since 1984, Lam is listed on the U.S. NASDAQ stock exchange ( symbol: LRCX ).

History

The Lam Research Corporation was founded in 1980 by David K. Lam in Fremont, California. Lam could its products, actually only the first 480 AutoEtch relatively quickly placing on the market and won next to the newly formed company " Trilogy " also well-known companies such as Intel, AMD and National Semiconductor as a customer. In 1984, four years after its founding, followed by the IPO. From 1985, Lam began building its global presence and established offices in Asia (especially Japan) and Europe. This was followed by branches in South Korea (1989 ) and China ( 1990) and a development center in Japan (1993).

Since the establishment etching systems are the core business of Lam Research for the semiconductor industry. A year after the establishment (1981 ) presented Lam its first product the AutoEtch 480 before, which was developed among others for the dry etching of polysilicon layers. In 1985 he was the etching system AutoEtch 590 for the processing of silica layers and 1987, the successor to the AutoEtch series was the Rainbow series introduced. The success of this series dealt with the introduction of the Transformer -Coupled Plasma technology (TCP ) technique in the 1990s continued. The patented technology was 9400 ( silicon etching, 1992) and TCP 9600 ( metal etching ) used in the plants and enabled TCP with their enhanced plasma technology more efficient and better quality production of chips. Current products are the series 2300 Kiyo, 2300 Flex and 2300 Versys for fully automatic etching of dielectric, conductive or metallic layers on 300 mm wafers. It also develops and manufactures Lam also facilities such as the single-wafer system TCP 9400DSiE, for the etching of holes in the Siliziumdurchkontaktierung (through- silicon via TSV ) - a technique that is required for future 3D IC integrated

In addition to the etching equipment Lam also tried other manufacturing equipment, such as cleaning and CVD coating systems to place on the market since the mid / late 1980s. So the company developed in 1988 a wet cleaning process for single-wafer, but only in 1991 was as a commercial product available, the SP series. Recent followers of this series are the Vinci and the DV - Prime series ( introduction in 2003 and 2007, respectively ) and plasma -based cleaning systems such as the 2300 Coronus.