Semiconductor Metrology/Inspection Is Capturing the Economics of Advanced Packaging
What’s in This Article
Introduction
Advanced Packaging Revenue by Company
Table 1: Advanced Packaging (HBM/Logic) Revenue by Company ($ millions)
Camtek: Saturation in Packaging Inspection
Nova: Structural Expansion into Packaging
KLA: Capturing the Bottleneck
OSAT Expansion and Process Control Intensity
Investor Takeaway
Chart 1: Share Price Performance – CAMT vs NVMI vs KLAC (1-Year)
Introduction
Advanced packaging is increasingly being identified as the primary driver of semiconductor capital intensity in artificial intelligence systems. The transition from monolithic die architectures to multi-die integration, including HBM stacking and CoWoS-like structures, has shifted the focus of manufacturing from transistor scaling to system-level integration. This shift is changing not only how chips are built, but where value is captured within the equipment stack.
The industry continues to describe advanced packaging growth in terms of capacity expansion and unit demand. That framing is incomplete. As integration density increases, the number of yield-sensitive interfaces expands, and the cost of failure rises accordingly. The result is a redistribution of capital spending within the manufacturing flow, with increasing emphasis on inspection and metrology relative to deposition and etch.
This article examines how that shift is reflected in company-level revenue exposure across process control suppliers. By isolating advanced packaging revenue within inspection and metrology, the analysis identifies where incremental spending is being directed and how that distribution differs among companies with varying levels of exposure, scale, and product focus.
Advanced Packaging Revenue by Company
According to Table 1, advanced packaging revenue growth is concentrated among process control suppliers but distributed unevenly across companies with different levels of exposure and scale. All revenue data for this table comes from my report at The Information Network entitled “Metrology, Inspection, and Process Control in VLSI Manufacturing.”
KLA’s (KLAC) advanced packaging revenue increases from