Most high-technology manufacturing has three special characteristics which place particular demands on manufactures.

First, a high degree of automation is required. Either the material must be kept clean at the micron or sub-micron level or the volume of parts produced is much too high for humans to do manually.

Second, most early stages of high-technology manufacturing – substrate, wafer fab, thin-film glass – are process-oriented, requiring large amounts of data for advanced process control of complex equipment.

Third, this equipment requires a sophisticated communications protocol in order to automate all of the material transport, recipe management, data collection, and process control requirements. Nearly all high-technology manufacturers have adopted the SEMI standards for equipment connectivity. 

Semiconductor, MEMS, compound semiconductor, including substrate manufacturing, wafer fab, assembly and test.		Photovoltaic / Solar, including wafer-based and thin film as well as flat panel display (FPD) manufacturers.		Electronics, including PCB, electronics assembly, consumer, commercial, and industrial electronics.