Onto Innovation Brand Guidelines: Rudolph, Nanometrics & a 2019 Merger in Wilmington

Rudolph and Nanometrics.

Onto Innovation is a young name with two older lineages. English Wikipedia describes it as an American semiconductor company formed in 2019 from the merger of Rudolph Technologies and Nanometrics, and as a provider of process and process-control equipment and software for microelectronics manufacturing. It is headquartered in Wilmington, Massachusetts, and its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ONTO.

The older line runs back to 1940. According to English Wikipedia, citing Rudolph’s own history page, Otto Curt Rudolph formed O.C. Rudolph & Sons that year as an importer of microscopes and scientific instruments. The business was renamed Rudolph Research Corporation in October 1970 and designed optical equipment for laboratories and universities. Its specialism became ellipsometry, the measurement of thin films with polarised light, and Wikipedia credits it with the first production-oriented ellipsometer for thin, transparent films.

In June 1996 the investment firms Riverside Partners of Boston and Liberty Partners of New York invested in the company, and the industry veteran Paul F. McLaughlin became chief executive. The company took the name Rudolph Technologies in August 1999 and sold shares to the public in November that year, when it also launched the MetaPULSE line of copper film measurement tools, Wikipedia says.

Nanometrics, the other half, was founded in 1975 and worked in optical metrology; it began trading publicly in 1984, according to English Wikipedia. By 2019 it was based in Milpitas, California, and its shares traded on Nasdaq under the ticker NANO, Semiconductor Today reported.

A string of acquisitions.

Before the merger, Rudolph grew by buying. English Wikipedia lists the Richardson, Texas, defect-software company ISOA in 2002, which became Rudolph’s Yield Metrology Group; a merger in 2006 with August Technology of Minnesota, which took Rudolph into the “back end” of chip manufacturing; the semiconductor business of Applied Precision in 2007, which added probe card test and analysis; and the RVSI Wafer Scanner inspection business, announced in 2008. Process-control software followed with Adventa in 2009 and MKS Instruments’ Yield Dynamics business in 2010.

Two purchases in 2012 shaped much of the present company. NanoPhotonics of Mainz, in Germany, brought unpatterned wafer inspection, and Azores Corp. of Wilmington, Massachusetts, gave Rudolph its entry into lithography for advanced packaging and flat-panel displays, Wikipedia says. Selected 3D metrology assets of Tamar Technology followed in 2013 and inspection technology from Stella Alliance in 2015. Michael P. Plisinski became chief executive in November 2015.

The two companies had talked for years. In January 2017 the activist investor Voce Capital urged Rudolph and Nanometrics to merge, English Wikipedia says, citing The Wall Street Journal; it adds, citing the joint proxy statement, that discussions had begun in 2016. The deal was agreed in June 2019 and completed on 25 October 2019, Semiconductor Today reported on 28 October. Nanometrics’ shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange as ONTO, Rudolph’s shares stopped trading, and each Rudolph share converted into 0.8042 Onto shares. The new board of twelve was drawn equally from the two companies, with Christopher A. Seams as chairman and Plisinski as chief executive.

The merged company kept its predecessors’ sites as specialist centres. Semiconductor Today reported that metrology development would be based in Milpitas, inspection in Bloomington, Minnesota, and software and lithography in Wilmington. English Wikipedia lists further US operations in New Jersey, Minnesota, California, Texas, Oregon and Washington.

Design and documentation.

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.

Four letters, one ticker.

Onto Innovation has continued to buy. In November 2025 it completed the purchase of three product lines from the materials analysis business of Semilab International — FAaST, CnCV and MBIR — which the company says add inline wafer contamination monitoring, materials characterization and surface charge metrology to its range. It said at the time that Semilab customers would be served through its own global support and manufacturing infrastructure.

Today the company sorts its products into four groups on its website: inspection of patterned and unpatterned wafers and panels; metrology, including optical critical dimension and film measurement; lithography, in the form of steppers for advanced packaging; and process control and analytics software. It describes a portfolio that runs from “bare silicon wafers through the wafer fab to the final back-end packaging,” and calls itself “a leader in process control.” It names Customer Success as its guiding principle and Passion, Integrity, Collaboration and Results as its core values. In October 2026, the company says, it received a Best Partner Award from SK hynix connected with high bandwidth memory production.

The name is also the ticker: Onto shares trade as ONTO, so the brand and the listing share one four-letter word. Rudolph Technologies carried its founder’s surname; the merged company does not.

For a design guide, Onto Innovation shows how a merger of equals can produce a new name over two older companies. Compare KLA, another process-control maker shaped by a merger, and Camtek, an inspection and metrology maker from Israel. For this guide we use a deep blue and a teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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