Atomic layer deposition and etch equipment

Every advanced chip made today passes through a machine India cannot build. As of 2026, the country imports 100% of its atomic layer deposition (ALD) and atomic layer etch (ALE) equipment, and there is no indigenous development programme or prototype for either.

These are the tools that lay down and remove material one atomic layer at a time. ALD builds films of exceptional uniformity — greater than 95% conformal coverage — over the narrow, deep structures of modern devices, and does so at temperatures below 400°C. It has been steadily replacing older chemical vapour deposition for exactly this reason. The tools are mandatory, not optional: sub-5nm and 3nm logic, 3D NAND memory stacked past 300 layers, and FinFET gate stacks all depend on them. There is no route around this capability to a leading-edge fab.

The difficulty is why so few can do it. Only seven nations possess the capability — the Netherlands, United States, Japan, Taiwan, Finland, Germany and South Korea. Five firms, led by ASM International, Tokyo Electron, Applied Materials, Lam Research and Veeco, hold over 70% of the ALD market as of 2025. In etch, the top two players together account for 60.9% of the ALE market. The global ALD equipment market was worth USD 4.7 billion in 2025 and is growing at roughly 11% a year — a market concentrated in very few hands.

India's presence is at the research bench. The Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology in Indore runs a thermal ALD system for thin-film research. Lam Research opened a Bengaluru engineering centre in September 2022 for R&D and testing of deposition hardware for DRAM, NAND and logic — but not manufacturing of ALD or ALE tools.

The gap persists because the tool sits atop a deep stack of capabilities. India can produce precursor chemicals, RF plasma subsystems and ultra-high-vacuum chambers, but in-situ process metrology is only emerging, and the process-control software and materials IP that make a tool work are concentrated inside the incumbent manufacturers. Above all, scale-up manufacturing of cleanroom-compatible equipment to SEMI standards simply does not exist domestically. Every planned Indian fab — Tata-PSMC, Tower-Adani — will rely entirely on foreign equipment.

What it would take is visible in how others have moved. In September 2025, Lam Research formed a USD 320 million joint venture with Naura Technology to localise ALD and ALE production for China. Closing India's gap means building the metrology, the process software, the materials knowledge, and finally a SEMI-standard factory beneath it.