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Semiconductor History | Nikon Yokohama — The Stepper Plant Closes
· 2025-9
Personal memoryBy kevin · · updated · Report an issue
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Semiconductor History | Nikon Yokohama — The Stepper Plant Closes
kevin
9/30/2025
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On 30 September 2025, Nikon closed its Yokohama Plant after nearly six decades. The Ofuna site had opened in 1967 and later housed a specialized lithography-equipment plant, making its closure a physical marker of both Japan’s rise in chipmaking tools and the consolidation that followed.
Nikon entered stepper development through Japan’s VLSI Technology Research Association in 1976. It completed the SR-1 prototype in 1978 and commercialized the NSR-1010G in 1980, the first Japanese-produced reduction-projection stepper, with a one-micrometer resolution.
The good was the conversion of camera and precision-instrument skills into semiconductor infrastructure. Reduction optics, mechanical stages, alignment, and control had to work as a single system, and Nikon’s success helped Japanese fabs obtain domestically produced tools as lithography became central to shrinking circuits.
Nikon later completed a dedicated lithography-system plant within Yokohama and began shipping systems to the United States. The achievement was not isolationist: the government-backed VLSI project shared prototype evaluation among equipment and semiconductor companies, while global customers tested Nikon against foreign rivals.
The bad was that leadership did not stay fixed. Early step-and-repeat tools faced throughput and submicron challenges, and every change in wavelength, optics, or exposure architecture demanded another expensive technical bet; precision excellence in one generation did not guarantee control of the next.
Nikon described the Yokohama closure as a consolidation of development and production functions among facilities in Shinagawa, Yokosuka, and Sagamihara. A local report said the closure would not entail workforce reductions.
The factory’s closure makes that cycle visible in brick and land.
The pin marks the closed Yokohama site, whose future use was still undecided when the closure was reported. The photograph instead shows the entrance to Nikon’s former museum in Shinagawa because no sufficiently specific reusable Yokohama image passed this batch’s image gate.
Photo: Focus35mm, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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