Semiconductor & Electronics

Japan’s Semiconductor Stack Advantage: From Materials to Advanced Packaging

Most conversations about chips start in the same place. NVIDIA’s GPUs. TSMC’s fabs. Who is taping out faster and who is scaling bigger. But that view skips the part that actually decides whether any of this works. The physics. The chemicals. The wafers. The tools that make nanometers behave. That layer still sits firmly in Japan’s hands. For years, Japan was described as a materials supplier that missed the platform shift. That reading is outdated. What is happening now is quieter and more deliberate. Japan is moving from a materials monopoly into a full stack position by extending its upstream dominance into tools, inspection, and advanced packaging. Chiplets and 3D stacking are not side trends here. They are the natural next step for a country that already controls how chips…