ASM International Brand Guidelines: Arthur del Prado’s Bilthoven Firm & Thin-Film Deposition

A sales agent in Bilthoven.

ASM International began with one man in Bilthoven, in the Netherlands. English and Dutch Wikipedia both say Arthur del Prado founded it in 1964 as Advanced Semiconductor Materials, at first as a one-man trading business selling semiconductor-making technology in Europe; Dutch Wikipedia says it was registered as a private limited company in April 1968. The company itself gives 1968 as its founding year, “at the very start of the semiconductor industry,” so the two dates mark the trading business and the incorporated firm.

The agent soon became a maker. The company says it began producing furnace deposition systems in the Netherlands in the early 1970s, and Wikipedia says the sale of horizontal plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition furnaces drove its growth in that decade. In 1974 it bought Fico Toolings, a maker of semiconductor moulds at Herwen, according to Dutch Wikipedia.

ASM also started companies abroad. A Hong Kong sales office opened in 1975 to sell Fico products; it later became ASM Pacific Technology, now ASMPT, and was listed in Hong Kong in 1989. ASM America was set up in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1976, and ASM Japan in 1982, which Dutch Wikipedia calls the first wholly Dutch-owned subsidiary in that country. The company’s shares were listed on Nasdaq from May 1981 until 2015.

A parent of ASML, ASMPT and Besi.

ASM’s place in Dutch industry rests partly on the companies that came out of it. In the mid-1980s it joined Philips in a joint venture to develop lithography machines, the company says; that business is today ASML, and ASM sold its stake in 1988, the same year it let go of its ion-implant business. In 1993 it sold ASM Fico to Berliner Elektro Holding, the group now known as Besi, according to Wikipedia. ASMPT, the Hong Kong offshoot, makes assembly and packaging equipment; ASM says it sold its majority share in 2013 and keeps a minority stake.

After a reorganisation between 1991 and 1994, Wikipedia says, ASM concentrated on deposition: vertical low-pressure furnaces from ASM Europe, single-wafer epitaxy from ASM America and single-wafer plasma deposition from ASM Japan. Deposition means growing very thin layers of material on a silicon wafer, one of the repeated steps in making a chip.

The technique that shaped its recent history is atomic layer deposition, or ALD, which builds a film one atomic layer at a time. ASM bought ASM Microchemistry in 1999 and ASM Genitech in Korea in 2004 to grow in it, the company says. It also says that in 2007 its Pulsar ALD tool became the first system used in high-volume manufacturing of chips with a new hafnium-based gate insulator; Wikipedia describes the same step as ASM bringing ALD from research into volume production after nearly a decade of work.

Its named ranges include the Synergis, Pulsar and EmerALD ALD tools, the Eagle XP8 for plasma ALD, the Epsilon and Intrepid epitaxy tools and the A400 DUO and Sonora vertical furnaces, according to Wikipedia. In 2022 it bought LPE, an Italian maker of silicon carbide epitaxy equipment, the company says.

Machines behind glass.

Semiconductor equipment makers sell to a small circle of customers: the chip manufacturers that run wafer fabs. Their machines deposit, etch, measure, test and package, and they are rarely seen outside a cleanroom. That shapes how these companies present themselves. The product is a large enclosed tool, and what happens inside it takes place at a scale no camera can show directly.

So the pictures tend to repeat. Corporate sites and annual reports show tools standing in rows behind glass, with panelled housings in white, pale grey or blue, and cleanroom staff in full gowns, hoods and gloves. A polished wafer held up to the light in a gloved hand is a familiar image, because it stands in for the chips the machines help to make. Fab interiors, lit evenly and seen down long corridors, give a sense of size and order.

Words do much of the work that pictures cannot. Makers describe their processes by name — atomic layer deposition, epitaxy, metal-organic chemical vapour deposition, wire bonding, wafer inspection — and give their tool ranges short product names and model numbers. Company histories, milestone lists and timelines are common, since many of these firms began as university spin-offs, sales agents or divisions of larger groups, and changed hands or split along the way.

Trade fairs remain a meeting point for this industry. SEMICON West and SEMICON Taiwan are among the shows where equipment makers set up stands, present new tools and meet customers. For a design guide, the pattern is a disciplined, technical register: cool colours, precise product names and photographs of clean, closed machines.

From Bilthoven to Almere.

The founder’s family ran the company for more than four decades. Arthur del Prado was chief executive until 2008, when his son Chuck del Prado succeeded him; Chuck del Prado stepped down in 2020 and was followed by Benjamin Loh, the company and Wikipedia say. In February 2024 Management Scope reported that Loh would not seek a second term and would leave at the shareholders’ meeting of 13 May 2024, to be succeeded by Hichem M’Saad, who had joined ASM in 2015 and had been chief technology officer and a member of the management board since 2022. The company’s website now names M’Saad as chief executive.

In 2009 the head office moved from Bilthoven to Almere, according to Wikipedia. A restructuring after that, the encyclopedia says, brought a single global sales organisation and the consolidation of manufacturing in Singapore. Wikipedia says production now takes place mainly in Singapore and at Dongtan in South Korea, with research sites in Almere, Helsinki, Leuven, Phoenix, Tama in Japan and Dongtan; the company itself speaks of “centralized manufacturing in Singapore.” ASM’s shares have traded on Euronext Amsterdam since 1996, and the company joined the AEX index in March 2020.

In public the company calls itself simply ASM, the name it uses across its website, and today describes itself as “a materials discovery company.” It says it employs more than 4,800 people in 15 key locations, and it has a two-tier board, with a management board and a supervisory board. Its customers are chip manufacturers, which use its machines in their wafer fabs, Dutch Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, ASM International shows how a short, technical name can stay in place while the businesses around it are spun off and sold. Compare ASML, which began in its joint venture with Philips, and Besi, which took over its moulding business. For this guide we use a navy, a pale mist and a teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep ASM International’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.