Global Semis and Semicap: Notes from the road - Takeaways from meetings at SEMICON West

Last week at SEMICON West in San Francisco we met with a number of industry company management teams both in and out of our formal coverage, including Applied Materials, Lam Research, PDF Solutions, Soitec, Nova, FormFactor and Advanced Energy Industries. Lam reiterated confidence in its mid-50s long-term gross margin target, described a robust demand environment with visibility several quarters out and a loose sense of demand through 2029, and suggested 2027 WFE will be strong; the main constraint is customer cleanroom space rather than component shortages. AMAT views widespread 3D DRAM adoption as inevitable but not necessarily imminent, and will deliver photonic products (wave guides and lenses) for eyepieces and glasses, seeing a multi-billion dollar TAM by 2030 with a Singapore fab and an agreement with Google. PDF Solutions has shifted from a foundry-centric model to vertically serving analytics across foundries, IDMs, fabless players, equipment vendors and OSATs, with fabless no