Applied Materials and TEL merger, bigger they get to smaller the node

The U.S. based Applied Materials and Japan based Tokyo Electron have agreed to merge their businesses to form a new company valued at US dollar 29 billion. Both Applied Materials (rank 1) and Tokyo Electron (rank 3) are leading semiconductor equipment suppliers. They make equipments for photolithography etching, vapour deposition, thermal processing, and plating. Applied Materials offers broader services than the Tokyo Electron. Applied Materials is also into development of manufacturing equipment for solar PV panels. Both these companies have core-expertise in precision mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, and electromechanical machine design. They only have the domain knowledge of electronics, semiconductor and VLSI design industry to understand the requirements of semiconductor chip designers. However they use the chips made by the current line production equipment supplied by them at chip fabs in designing the embedded computer and controller boards inside next version of their semiconductor equipment. They help electronic engineers to realise their silicon designs on physical device by supplying the equipment to process the semiconductor and other required materials in chip fabrication. The leading semiconductor companies such as Intel and TSMC able to make 14 nm and 16 nm node chips due to the innovation in semiconductor equipment achieved by compan...