Very cool! Money came mainly from sales, but we also offered training courses and had a large services and maintenance division, since the tools did require per

Very cool! Money came mainly from sales, but we also offered training courses and had a large services and maintenance division, since the tools did require periodic maintenance. A lot of these tools also have "consumables", just like other large pieces of equipment. Gas sources, graphite liners for beamline components, etc. As a whole the industry was very cyclical though. We would employ a ton of people in the factories in the years when everyone was moving to new process nodes, but in the years in between there could be lots of manufacturing layoffs / shifts to part time. On the engineering side work was more constant since we would be busy working on the next generation of tools. When I left we were working on the transition from 300mm wafers to 450mm (12 in. to 18 in.) As far as the profit margins went, I forgot our divisions exact numbers, but AMAT as a whole had roughly ~40% gross profit margins from what I remember. Being on the supplier side of the millions/billion dollar fab builds is a good business :-)