I love bargain stocks, especially when they're hitting 52-week lows. Still, it can be instructive to also look at stocks that are riding high.

For one thing, they can make good sell candidates. More optimistically, we may be able to find a few companies that can continue their upward climbs.

In this series, I'll be searching industry by industry for stocks reaching 52-week highs. That way, we'll be able to make a few quick comparisons among semi-related companies.

There are 24 industry groups as defined by the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS). Semiconductors and semiconductor equipment is one of them.

Below are the top seven companies in this space, by market cap, that are within spitting distance of their 52-week highs.

Company

Recent Price

52-Week Low

52-Week High

P/E Ratio (Trailing)

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE: TSM)

$10.76

$9.30

$11.69

12.4
Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN)

$28.98

$22.30

$29.19

13.8
Broadcom (Nasdaq: BRCM)

$37.51

$25.80

$38.47

31.6
First Solar (Nasdaq: FSLR)

$147.15

$98.70

$158.14

20.0
Analog Devices (NYSE: ADI)

$32.27

$25.30

$32.83

16.4
Altera (Nasdaq: ALTR)

$30.24

$19.20

$30.97

13.9
ARM Holdings (Nasdaq: ARMH)

$17.93

$7.15

$19.96

76.6

Sources: Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor's; and Yahoo! Finance.

The first thing I noticed on this list is that Taiwan Semiconductor makes both the 52-week highs list and the 52-week lows list. You can see its tight $2.39 trading band over the past year; many don't realize the sheer size of the company -- it's about half the size of Intel.

For a smaller but still large-cap play, fellow Fool Sean Williams points out the possible opportunity in buying Broadcom to ride Apple's iPhone success. He notes two other stocks as well. 

If you're interested in reading more about any of these stocks, add them to My Watchlist to find all of our Foolish analysis on them.