Follow the tool, not just the chip. The most durable leverage in semiconductors often sits with the companies that sell the equipment, not the ones that ship the silicon. Applied Materials (AMAT) was granted US12645157B2, "Vacuum bake for EUV lithography," on June 2, 2026 (CPC G03F 7/70875).
Glossing the step once: EUV lithography uses extreme-ultraviolet light to print the finest features, and the photoresist and surrounding films must be processed precisely for the exposure to come out clean. A "vacuum bake" is a controlled thermal step under vacuum that conditions those films. It is one of many process steps around the EUV scanner — and the equipment makers own the IP for those steps.
Why the equipment layer has quiet leverage: the foundries buy their tools and process modules from a short list of suppliers — ASML for the scanners, Applied Materials and a few others for deposition, etch, and the surrounding process equipment. Because the supplier base is concentrated and the IP is deep, the equipment makers capture durable value and shape what the foundries can do. A process patent like this is a small piece of that structural position.
The careful read: this is a single process-step patent, not a claim on EUV itself (the scanner IP belongs to ASML and Carl Zeiss). It tells you Applied Materials is reinforcing its position in the process steps around EUV, where it competes — not that it controls lithography. Scope lives in the specifics, and the specifics here are the bake, not the exposure.
The export-control shadow is worth naming, because it is the equipment layer where geopolitics bites hardest. Restrictions on advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment reshape the addressable market for exactly these suppliers, and their filings carry the heaviest concentration and geographic-exposure language in the sector. A process patent is the technical asset; the risk factor is where the policy risk to monetizing it shows up.
Read it for the structure: the equipment makers sit upstream of the foundries and capture value through deep process IP, and Applied Materials' EUV vacuum-bake patent is one more brick in that upstream position.