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Veeco makes the specialized machines that chipmakers and other manufacturers use to build and coat microscopic layers of material on semiconductor wafers and other surfaces.
Veeco is a maker of big, complicated machines that help build the tiny things inside modern electronics. When a chipmaker needs to deposit or shape layers of material only a few atoms thick on a silicon wafer, it buys a tool that does that job with extreme precision. Veeco sells those tools, along with the services and spare parts that keep them running.
The company's two main families of products are its semiconductor equipment and its compound semiconductor equipment. The first group includes machines for steps like ion beam deposition and etching — processes that sculpt and coat wafers — plus laser annealing tools that heat tiny areas very quickly, which matters as chips get more advanced. The second group serves chipmakers working with materials beyond plain silicon, such as silicon carbide and gallium nitride, which are used in power electronics and in communications gear like 5G. Those specialized chips are in growing demand for electric vehicles and faster wireless networks. Veeco's customers are the big chip factories, or foundries, and the equipment makers that supply them, mostly concentrated in Asia — Taiwan, South Korea, China, and Japan. It competes with much larger toolmakers such as Applied Materials and Lam Research, so it survives by being excellent in a few narrow specialties rather than trying to do everything. That also makes it something of a bellwether: when chipmakers slow down their spending on new factories, Veeco feels it fast, and when they ramp up for a new generation of chips, so does Veeco. Its laser annealing business in particular has become a meaningful growth driver as advanced logic chips require more careful thermal processing.
Saved answer · last researched 21 Oct 2026
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