Japan's Advantest Corp. is grabbing North America market share, according to VLSI Research Inc.

The report shows Advantest experienced a 145 percent growth in its sales and moved up nine positions to capture eighth place in 2004. While Advantest is known mostly for its memory testers, its growth in the North American market can likely be attributed at least in part to its foray into logic test and its efforts to develop a tester based on the Semiconductor Test Consortium's open architecture standard for ATE.

As for the rest of the big names in the North American market, Applied Materials Inc., the world's largest process tool vendor, still kept the top spot for the last nine years in a row. Tokyo Electron Ltd., the second largest vendor behind Applied, followed its larger rival in the no. 2 spot.

The overall chip equipment consumption in North America increased 19 percent from $7 billion in 2003 to $8.3 billion in 2004. The top 10 suppliers accounted for $4.4 billion of that total. U.S.-based suppliers accounted for five spots on the top 10 list; Japan accounted for four spots. The remaining spot went to Dutch litho tool vendor ASML, which occupied the no. 3 spot with $618 million in sales last year in North America.