Lam Research: The Innovative Journey of a Future-oriented Company.
Innovation is what keeps a company to stay relevant to the changing market trends. This innovation keeps the company going and deal with high-pressure competition. Lam Research is a company that also believes in adapting the change and making use of the technology of the future. This very attitude has kept Lam Research stay on the top in the semiconductor market even after 30 years of its inception, and it has never failed to impress its clients with the innovation it brings for them.
Establishment of Lam Research
Lam Research is a leading semiconductor processing equipment design and manufacturing company. It serves the major semiconductor manufacturing businesses from all around the world. The major areas where the company serves, include the United States, Europe, and Asia. The company products involve the manufacturing of equipment for front-end wafer processing and back-end wafer-level packaging (WLP).
Lam Research company headquarter is located in Fremont in Silicon Valley, California. As of 2019, Lam Research made an annual revenue of US$ 9.65 billion, and around 10,700 employees are working for the company in its various branches in the world. Currently, Timothy M. Archer is serving Lam Research as the president and chief executive officer. Before that, he was working as the executive vice president and chief operating officer of the company.
Products from Lam Research
The company specializes in manufacturing thin film deposition, plasma etch, photoresist strip, etc., for the manufacturing of semiconductors. The company offers smart wafer processing solutions for the tine chips to be used in the transistor, interconnect, patterning, advanced memory, and packaging to sensors and transducers. The products made by the company are essentially used in mobile phones, computing devices, entertainment systems, and also in the new smart cars.
The Back Story
David K. Lam founded Lam Research in 1980. Lam was working as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard when he thought of bringing better plasma etching equipment into the market at the time when the semiconductors were reducing in size. He was sceptical about his business plan, but Intel’s founder Bob Noyce helped him in raising the funds for the company.
The Company introduced its first automated polysilicon plasma etcher, AutoEtch 480, in 1981 and sold the first system in the January of the next year. Just four years of its inception, the company had its first IPO on NASDAQ, and it traded as LRCX. Though Lam was the founder of Lam Research, he left the company in 1985 and joined Link Technologies. During the late 80s and the beginning of the 90s, the company had started to expand overseas. The company established its factory units and customer support centers in countries like Taiwan, the U.S., China, Korea, Singapore, and Japan.
Lam Research also did some major acquisitions during the same time. It acquired the chip equipment manufacturing company, OnTrak Systems Inc., in 1997 by paying a sum of $225 Million. This acquisition helped the company grow even faster. In fact, the CEO of OnTrak Jim Bagley was also appointed the CEO of Lam Research in the same year. In the late 2000s, Lam Research made some powerful acquisitions, including Bullen Semiconducto (2005), SEZ (2008), and Novellus Systems (2011). Lam Research also made it to the Fortune 500 list in 2016.
Lam Research in 2017 established an investment firm named Lam Research Capital to enhance its investments in new companies.
The Founder: David K. Lam
Before becoming a famous entrepreneur in the U.S., David K. Lam had to wander around in various countries. He was born in Guangdong, China on 10 February 1943, but he spent most of his childhood in Cholon, South Vietnam. In the mid-50s, he, along with his family, moved to Hong Kong, where he joined Pui Ching Middle School.
To complete his further studies, Lam flew to Canada and attended the University of Toronto, and received a bachelor’s degree in Applied Science in Engineering Physics in 1967. He then completed an M.S. degree and an Sc.D. doctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the 1970 and 1973, respectively. As soon he completed his education, he joined Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard. This was the same time when he thought of founding Lam Research. Currently, Lam is serving as the chairman of Multibeam Corporation.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.