>never heard of KLA

KLA, ASML, TSMC are companies that are huge globally in their fields.

The field being semiconductor design and fabrication.

Whatever device you're reading this on almost certainly has components made with machinery by one (or all) of those.

With all the stuff about chips and fabs and Taiwan in the news in the past year, you'd have to be living under a rock to not know who TSMC and ASML are.

However, I too have never heard of KLA. Somehow it never gets mentioned alongside those other companies. Maybe it's similar to how everyone knows about Microsoft and Apple, and even my mother knows what Linux is, but almost no one has heard of Green Hills Software?

I don't know what's common knowledge, but comparison to Green Hills doesn't hold.

KLA makes wafer inspection and process control equipment and has very little (if any) competition in what they do. They're big.

As in, they have 10B revenue and 15,000 employees.

That's roughly 1/3 of what ASML is (ASML has 30B revenue and 45K employees).

It's more like your grandma knowing about Nintendo, but not Valve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KLA_Corporation