ARM vs LRCX Comparison

Arm Holdings is the IP owner and developer of the ARM architecture, which is used in 99% of the world's smartphone CPU cores, and it also has high market share in other battery-powered devices like wearables, tablets, or sensors. Arm licenses its architecture for a fee, offering different types of licenses depending on the flexibility the customer needs. Customers like Apple or Qualcomm buy architectural licenses, which allow them to modify the architecture and add or delete instructions to tailor the chips to their specific needs. Other clients directly buy off-the-shelf designs from Arm. Both off-the-shelf and architectural customers pay a royalty fee per chip shipped.

Lam Research is one of the largest semiconductor wafer fabrication equipment manufacturers in the world. It specializes in deposition and etch, which entail the buildup of layers on a semiconductor and the subsequent selective removal of patterns from each layer. Lam holds the top market share in etch and holds the clear second share in deposition. It is more exposed to memory chipmakers for DRAM and NAND chips. It counts as top customers the largest chipmakers in the world, including TSMC, Samsung, Intel, and Micron.