Advantest Brand Guidelines: Takeda Riken, a 1985 Rename & the Verigy Test Merger

Voltmeters, counters and a bet on chips.

Advantest began as Takeda Riken Industries, founded in December 1954. Japanese Wikipedia gives the date as 2 December 1954 and places the first company in Nerima, in Tokyo. Advantest’s own history names its founder as Ikuo Takeda and shows him among the original staff in an early group photograph.

The company started with electronic measuring instruments that did one job each, such as voltmeters and frequency counters. Its history says the TR-124B electronic counter of 1957, which measured frequency digitally, became a hit, and that the Digital Multimeter of 1963 was the first Japanese-made digital voltmeter. Advantest describes its early strategy as picking narrow markets, setting its products apart with technology and winning share in each, and says its business grew with the Japanese electronics industry.

The turn came at the end of the 1960s. Advantest says it was among the first companies to see the opportunity in semiconductors and “staked our fortune” on test systems built on its measurement technology, getting through a management crisis on the way. In 1972 it launched the T-320/20 and T-320/30, which it calls the first Japanese-made semiconductor test systems; English Wikipedia likewise dates the company’s entry into chip testing to 1972.

Japanese Wikipedia also records the company’s ties to larger groups. Fujitsu was a shareholder for a time, and Advantest has close links with the Furukawa Group. Citing the Nikkei in November 2017, it says Fujitsu sold all of its remaining Advantest shares that year, ending the capital relationship.

A new name in 1985.

Takeda Riken went public in 1983. Japanese Wikipedia dates its listing on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange to February 1983, and in 1985 the shares moved to the first section and the company took its present name, Advantest Corporation; English Wikipedia gives the same dates, citing the magazine Business Tokyo in 1987. In 2000, the company says, its stock was added to the Nikkei 225 index. Japanese Wikipedia adds a listing on the New York Stock Exchange from September 2001 to April 2016.

The company went abroad early. Its history says it set up a subsidiary in the United States in 1982, which Japanese Wikipedia places in New Jersey; English Wikipedia says European operations opened in Munich in 1983, and Japanese Wikipedia adds a Singapore subsidiary in 1986.

Test systems became the core of the business in the 1980s, the company says. Its history marks the T6691 VLSI test system of 1993, the T5581 memory test system of 1995, which it says soon sold strongly, and the T2000 of 2003, an open-architecture test system for systems-on-chip. In 2020 it launched the V93000 EXA Scale. Japanese Wikipedia notes that in 2003 part of the electronic measuring instruments division was spun off as a separate company, ADC.

Japanese Wikipedia lists the company’s main research and production sites in Japan: research and development centres in Gunma, Saitama and Kitakyushu, and a factory in Gunma Prefecture. At its Gunma R&D centre the company says it created a biotope in 2001, which it describes as the largest in Japan. Japanese Wikipedia also records its first television commercial, shown in 1998 to coincide with the Nagano Winter Olympics.

Equipment, cleanrooms and trade fairs.

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.

Verigy and the buying years.

The largest step came in 2011. In July that year Evaluation Engineering, in an article republished by Electronic Design, reported that Advantest had completed its acquisition of Verigy, the tester maker that had grown out of the test and measurement division of Hewlett-Packard, and that Verigy would run as a wholly owned subsidiary. The report said Advantest had been strong in memory test and volume production, while Verigy was strong in non-memory test and research markets, and that Advantest’s presence in Japan and Asia would be combined with Verigy’s in North America and Europe. Advantest’s own history calls the deal the second time it staked the company’s fortunes on a daring move.

Smaller purchases followed, most of them outside Japan. The company lists Credence Systems GmbH in 2008, W2BI.COM in 2013, the system-level test business of Astronics of the United States (dated 2019 by Advantest; English Wikipedia, citing The Buffalo News, dates the sale to 2018), Essai of the United States in 2020, R&D Altanova in 2021, CREA of Italy in 2022 and Shin Puu Technology of Taiwan in 2023. English Wikipedia adds Salland Engineering of the Netherlands in June 2024.

In 2024 Douglas Lefever was appointed group chief executive, the company says. Today Advantest Corporation has its head office in Marunouchi, in Tokyo’s Chiyoda ward, and its shares trade on the Prime Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. English Wikipedia describes its main business as semiconductor and component test systems, test handlers and related services.

For a design guide, Advantest shows an instrument maker whose 1985 name change followed its move from general measurement into chip testing. Compare Tokyo Electron, another Tokyo chip-equipment maker, and Teradyne, an American test-equipment maker. For this guide we use a deep plum, a cool grey and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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