Lam Research Corporation is an American corporation that engages in the design, manufacture, marketing, and service of semiconductor processing equipment used in the fabrication of integrated circuits. Its products are used primarily in front-end wafer processing, which involves the steps that create the active components of semiconductor devices (transistors, capacitors) and their wiring (interconnects). The company also builds equipment for back-end wafer-level packaging (WLP), and for related manufacturing markets such as for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Lam Research was founded in 1980 by Dr. David K. Lam and is headquartered in Fremont, California, in the Silicon Valley. As of 2018, it was the second largest manufacturer in the Bay Area, after Tesla.

Nvidia Corporation, more commonly referred to as Nvidia (stylized as NVIDIA; formerly stylized as nVidia on products from the mid 90s to early 2000s), is an American technology company incorporated in Delaware and based in Santa Clara, California. It designs graphics processing units (GPUs) for the gaming and professional markets, as well as system on a chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market. Its primary GPU product line, labeled “GeForce”, is in direct competition with Advanced Micro Devices’ (AMD) “Radeon” products. Nvidia expanded its presence in the gaming industry with its handheld Shield Portable, Shield Tablet, and Shield Android TV. Since 2014, Nvidia has diversified its business focusing on four markets: gaming, professional visualization, data centers, and auto. Nvidia is also now focused on artificial intelligence. In addition to GPU manufacturing, Nvidia provides parallel processing capabilities to researchers and scientists that allow them to efficiently run high-performance applications. They are deployed in supercomputing sites around the world. More recently, it has moved into the mobile computing market, where it produces Tegra mobile processors for smartphones and tablets as well as vehicle navigation and entertainment systems. In addition to AMD, its competitors include Intel, Qualcomm, and Arm (e.g., because of Denver, while Nvidia also licenses Arm’s designs).

Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globally.[4] Its headquarters are in Dallas, Texas, United States. TI is one of the top-10 semiconductor companies worldwide, based on sales volume.[5] Texas Instruments’s focus is on developing analog chips and embedded processors, which account for more than 80% of their revenue.[6] TI also produces TI digital light processing technology and education technology[6] products including calculators, microcontrollers and multi-core processors. To date, TI has more than 45,000 patents worldwide.[7] Texas Instruments emerged in 1951 after a reorganization of Geophysical Service Incorporated, a company founded in 1930 that manufactured equipment for use in the seismic industry, as well as defense electronics.[8] TI produced the world’s first commercial silicon transistor in 1954,[9] and designed and manufactured the first transistor radio in 1954. Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit in 1958 while working at TI’s Central Research Labs. TI also invented the hand-held calculator in 1967, and introduced the first single-chip microcontroller in 1970, which combined all the elements of computing onto one piece of silicon.[10] In 1987, TI invented the digital light processing device (also known as the DLP chip), which serves as the foundation for the company’s award-winning DLP technology and DLP Cinema.[10] In 1990, TI released the popular TI-81 calculator, which made it a leader in the graphing calculator industry. In 1997, its defense business was sold to Raytheon, which allowed TI to strengthen its focus on digital solutions.[11] After the acquisition of National Semiconductor in 2011, the company had a combined portfolio of nearly 45,000 analog products and customer design tools,[12] making it the world’s largest maker of analog technology components.