Semiconductor deposition is the film-building layer of the process flow: the CVD, PECVD, LPCVD, PVD, ALD, epitaxy and electroplating steps that grow every dielectric, metal and semiconductor layer on a wafer. Its engineers sit at chamber makers, precursor suppliers and fabs, and the discipline splits along chemistry, thermal budget and the precision each film demands. ASM International, which holds a leading position in single-wafer ALD and a growing share in epitaxy, reported record 2025 revenue of 3.2 billion euros, a ninth consecutive year of double-digit growth at constant currencies . The single-wafer ALD market it serves is projected to grow from $5.1 billion in 2024 to $6.1 billion by 2030 .
Challenges in Semiconductor Deposition Recruiting
ALD dominates the atom-precise end of thin-film deposition
ALD is where thin-film deposition meets atomic control. Self-limiting surface reactions deposit films one monolayer at a time, and that precision has made the technique load-bearing: gate oxides, spacers, liners and the barrier stacks of the most advanced nodes. ASM holds a market share above 55% in single-wafer ALD and describes its ALD and epitaxy technologies as the atomistic control behind 2nm gate-all-around devices and the DRAM transition from planar 6F² cells to vertical 4F² . The commercial stakes show in the roadmap: between the 2nm and 1.4nm generations, the addressable ALD and epitaxy content per wafer steps up by roughly 450 to 500 million euros . Hiring follows that step-up. An ALD engineer combines surface chemistry, precursor delivery physics and chamber design, and the work is unforgiving in a specific way: a pulse timing error measured in milliseconds produces a film failure measured in wafers. The population is small because the technique is young, and most of it sits inside two or three equipment houses.
LPCVD survives wherever furnaces still own thermal budgets
LPCVD runs the older, cheaper chemistry that still builds much of the industry's silicon nitride, polysilicon and oxide. Furnace tools process dozens of wafers per batch under thermal conditions that single-wafer tools cannot match economically. Tokyo Electron's integrated report counts batch deposition among its core franchises, with polysilicon gates and capacitor films for DRAM among the load-bearing applications . The engineering is conservative by design: temperature uniformity across a full boat, gas flow dynamics, and particle control maintained over years of duty. The batch furnace population skews senior, and its skills transfer poorly onto single-wafer platforms. A furnace engineer's instincts, soak times, ramp rates, boat rotation, run against a single-wafer chamber's fast cycling. As new nodes move even simple films onto ALD and PECVD platforms, the people who still understand furnaces retire faster than anyone is replacing them.
PVD fills the metallization slots CVD cannot reach
PVD is the line-of-sight workhorse: sputtering deposits metal hardmasks, barriers and seed layers where a chemical vapor route fails or costs too much. Tokyo Electron counts PVD metal hardmasks among its growth franchises as gate-all-around devices and backside power delivery multiply process steps . The metallization shift adds new chemistry on top of the physics. TECHCET reports molybdenum gaining traction for backside power delivery and 3D NAND metal gates, alongside rising use of zirconium, hafnium, cobalt and tungsten in precursor form . A sputtering engineer owns target life, resputtering and step coverage at trench corners; an ALD engineer owns pulse chemistry and surface saturation. Both write deposition on a CV. The probes that separate them are quick, chamber power and pressure on one side, precursor dose and purge on the other, but a keyword screen never reaches either.
Epitaxy moves from silicon logic into SiC and GaN power
Epitaxy has two lives. In silicon it serves leading-edge logic, where advanced epitaxial wafers were a named driver of 2025 silicon shipment growth . In compound semiconductors it serves power and RF, where ASM is expanding its silicon carbide epitaxy position alongside its silicon franchise . The two lives share crystal growth physics and nothing else. A silicon epi engineer lives in 300 mm throughput, slip management and defect density across enormous volumes; a SiC epi engineer lives in 150 mm and 200 mm reactors, doping control and the basal plane defects that kill power device yield. Demand pulls in both directions at once, which is exactly the problem: the keyword epitaxy returns two populations, and a brief that does not name the substrate and the application merges them into one shortlist where neither half fits.
Electroplating owns copper damascene, bumps and TSV fill
Electroplating is deposition's most industrial corner. Copper damascene interconnects, through-silicon vias and bump metallization grow in baths, not vacuums, under current distribution and additive chemistry rather than plasma. Lam's portfolio carries the Electrofill lineage it inherited from Novellus, the line that plated much of the industry's copper interconnect for a generation . Its deposition franchise also spans PECVD, which anchors the comparison: a PECVD engineer and a plating engineer both build films and share almost no tools. Plating people own bath chemistry, suppressor and accelerator balance, and void-free fill of high-aspect features. Their population barely overlaps the vacuum world, and much of it sits in advanced packaging and substrate supply chains rather than the front-end, which makes sourcing a search into companies a fab-centered brief would never list.
Molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) keeps III-V research and quantum builds alive at small volume
Molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) is the ultra-high-vacuum specialty of the discipline: effusion cells, shutters and layer-by-layer growth measured in fractions of a monolayer. RIBER, the MBE equipment leader, reported 2025 results driven by production systems and the rollout of its ROSIE oxide-on-silicon platform, with a systems order book up 22% year on year . The applications are niche but strategic: III-V lasers and detectors, and now functional oxides for photonics and quantum computing. MBE engineers combine ultra-high-vacuum practice, source material science and in-situ characterization such as RHEED, and the population is tiny, concentrated in a handful of research centers, national laboratories and epi houses. Employers who demand five years of commercial MBE production are describing a world that mostly runs on research machines. The credible brief hires the person who ran the reactor that will become production.
Deposition process development claims collapse without the chamber generation and film the candidate qualified
Deposition process development is where CVs converge and interviews separate. Every candidate has run CVD, PECVD or ALD somewhere; the question is which film, on which chamber, to what specification. Which film did you own, at what thickness and temperature window? What was the first excursion, adhesion, particles, uniformity? Which precursor set, which chamber generation, and which metrology closed the loop? ASM's growth rests on customers qualifying atomic-scale films for gate-all-around logic and 4F² DRAM ; the people who run those qualifications can describe deposition process development in numbers. A film demonstrated once in a lab at wide uniformity and a film held in production at a one percent window are different achievements carrying the same name. The cost of confusing them is an integration stall: a deposition seat filled below its spec holds every downstream module hostage, and the senior engineers pulled in to fix it are the ones the next node needed anyway.
References
- Highlights Annual Report 2025 — ASM International. (accessed 2026-09-28)
- ASM Q4 and FY 2025 Results Investor Presentation — ASM International. (accessed 2026-09-28)
- Tokyo Electron Integrated Report 2025 — Tokyo Electron. (accessed 2026-09-28)
- TECHCET Predicts Semiconductor ALD/CVD Precursor Market Outlook, Highlights Growth — TECHCET via Semiconductor Digest. (accessed 2026-09-28)
- SEMI Reports Global Silicon Wafer Shipments to Rebound 5.4% in 2025, with New Record Expected by 2028 — SEMI Silicon Manufacturers Group. (accessed 2026-09-28)
- Lam Research Company Overview — Lam Research. (accessed 2026-09-28)
- RIBER: 2025 Performance Driven by Production Systems and the Rollout of ROSIE — RIBER. (accessed 2026-09-28)