Himax Brand Guidelines: Tainan’s Display Driver Designer, a 2006 Nasdaq Listing & LCoS

A display-chip designer in southern Taiwan.

Himax Technologies was founded in Tainan, in southern Taiwan, on 12 June 2001, according to English and Chinese Wikipedia; its Chinese name is 奇景光電. It is a fabless company: it designs chips and has them made by others, rather than running its own wafer fabs. English Wikipedia describes the listed parent, Himax Technologies Limited, as a holding company set up under the companies law of the Cayman Islands, with the operating business in Taiwan.

From the start the company worked on the chips that sit at the edge of a flat panel. Its core products are display driver ICs, which switch the rows and columns of pixels on an LCD, and timing controllers, which feed them. In 2006 the Taipei Times, carrying an Associated Press report, described Himax as a designer of semiconductors for flat-panel-display products, and noted from its prospectus that it had begun operations only in June 2001.

That report also showed how closely the young company was tied to Taiwan’s panel makers. Its two largest customers were Chi Mei Optoelectronics and Chunghwa Picture Tubes, and Chi Mei Optoelectronics, its largest single customer, was also one of its largest shareholders, with about 13.6 percent of the shares at the end of 2005. The company’s chairman at the time was Wue Biing-seng, its chief executive Jordan Wu and its chief technical officer Tsai Chih-chung, the paper reported.

Drivers, controllers and tiny displays.

Himax’s product list has grown well beyond panel drivers. The company says its display driver ICs and timing controllers are used in televisions, PC monitors, laptops, mobile phones, tablets, cars, ePaper devices and industrial displays, and it describes itself as the global market share leader in automotive display technology — a claim we give as the company’s own. For cars it lists in-cell touch and display driver integration chips, known as TDDI, local-dimming timing controllers and OLED display chips.

A second line is the microdisplay. Himax Display, a subsidiary, makes liquid crystal on silicon, or LCoS, chips and modules, which project an image inside a head-mounted display. In July 2013 the Taipei Times reported that Google would take a 6.3 percent stake in Himax Display, with an option to raise it to 14.8 percent within a year, while Himax kept 81.5 percent. Himax said the money would fund production upgrades and more capacity at the unit’s LCoS facilities, whose chips were used in head-mounted displays such as Google Glass as well as head-up displays and pico-projectors. The paper named KPCB, Khosla Ventures and Intel Capital as existing shareholders in the unit.

The third line is sensing. Himax says its WiseEye ultralow-power AI sensing combines its own low-power AI processor, an always-on CMOS image sensor and neural-network algorithms, and that it is used in consumer electronics and connected devices. Other subsidiaries, the company says, are Himax Imaging for CMOS image sensors and Himax Analogic for power management and LED driver chips, and Himax lists wafer-level optics and 3D sensing among its optical products.

English Wikipedia adds that a Himax-designed semiconductor core was used in the OLPC XO-1, the low-cost laptop made for the One Laptop per Child project.

How chip designers present themselves.

A fabless chip designer has an unusual problem for a brand: its product is a small, dark square that most buyers never see. The company designs the chip, an outside foundry makes the wafers, and the finished part disappears inside someone else’s phone, television, router or car. The visual language of the category grows out of that gap between what the company makes and what anyone can look at.

One answer is the rendering. Chips appear floating above circuit-board landscapes, lit from below, with traces running off toward the horizon like roads seen from the air. Another is the die photograph: a close view of the silicon itself, often tinted in false colour so that memory blocks, processor cores and interfaces read as separate districts on a map.

A third answer is to show the products the chip ends up in. Reference designs — earbuds, security cameras, smart speakers, displays, small smart-home gadgets — let a designer point to a finished object without claiming it as its own. Developer kits and evaluation boards, photographed on desks next to laptops and cables, speak to the engineers who choose components.

The calendar matters too. Much of the category’s public presentation happens at trade shows such as CES in Las Vegas, Computex in Taipei, Embedded World in Nuremberg and the Hot Chips conference, where booths, demo walls and technical papers carry the brand. Many press releases follow the same rhythm, dated from headquarters and timed to a show. The guides that follow look at how individual companies work within these conventions, and at what can be documented about each one.

A Taiwanese listing in New York.

Himax went public in the United States rather than at home. Its American depositary shares began trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol HIMX on a Friday at the end of March 2006, the Taipei Times reported on 2 April 2006, citing Associated Press. The paper, quoting Thomson Financial data, called it the largest technology offering in the United States so far that year; iTnews reported on 4 April 2006 that it was the largest share sale by a Taiwanese company since Chunghwa Telecom’s in 2000. Most of the shares sold came from existing holders, and Chi Mei Optoelectronics sold none, the Taipei Times said. The company remains listed on Nasdaq, and its website carries quarterly results, shareholder meetings and filings made to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Today the company says it employs around 2,200 people, at three offices in Taiwan — Tainan, Hsinchu and Taipei — and in China, Korea and the United States, and that it holds about 3,000 patents worldwide. As a fabless designer it does not run its own wafer fabs, though it says it runs an in-house colour filter fab for its LCoS and image-sensor products. Its headquarters remain in Tainan.

Visually, Himax presents itself through its product families rather than through a published brand story: drivers and controllers for panels, LCoS for head-mounted displays, and WiseEye for always-on sensing. No public guidance on its logo, typeface or colours is documented, so everything below is our own reading.

For a design guide, Himax shows how a component maker defines itself by the screens it serves: one company spanning panel drivers, microdisplays and image sensors. Compare Novatek, another Taiwanese display driver designer, and MediaTek, a Taiwanese fabless chip company on a larger scale. For this guide we use a deep indigo, a teal and a soft violet with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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