Amkor Brand Guidelines: ANAM’s 1968 Chip Line, an America-Korea Name & a Peoria Campus

A Seoul trading house and a Philadelphia sales office.

Amkor’s story starts in Seoul. The company says its honorary chairman, Hyang-Soo Kim, opened his first business there in 1935, selling imported Japanese goods including bicycles; English Wikipedia gives the same account. Korean Wikipedia dates the business to 1939 and gives its first name as Ilman Trading, saying it was renamed ANAM after Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule in 1945. In both accounts it was a trading business, not a factory.

Chips came later. In March 1968, the company says, ANAM Industries became ANAM Industrial Co. Ltd., “South Korea’s first semiconductor business,” starting with three wire bonders and two die bonders. In April 1968, its timeline says, Hyang-Soo Kim’s eldest son, Joo-Jin (James) Kim, founded Amkor Electronics and opened a sales office in Philadelphia; the narrative on the same page gives 1970 for Amkor Electronics. English Wikipedia also gives 1968. In 1970 ANAM began exporting semiconductors in metal cans to the United States, which the company calls the first recorded semiconductor export from Korea.

The company describes a division of labour: Amkor Electronics handled sales and marketing in the United States while ANAM concentrated on production and research in Korea, the company says. The name records that split. Amkor “combines America and Korea in name,” the company says, and English Wikipedia describes it as a blend of the two words.

From ANAM’s plants to a global network.

Amkor added factories of its own. Its timeline says it bought an AMD plant in 1989, founding Amkor Philippines, and added further Philippine plants in 1995 and 2000. Amkor Electronics listed on Nasdaq in May 1998 and became Amkor Technology, Inc., the company says.

The Korean side changed in the Asian financial crisis. Korean Wikipedia says ANAM Industrial was renamed Anam Semiconductor in March 1998 and entered a corporate workout that October. It then transferred its Gwangju plant to Amkor in May 1999, and its semiconductor assembly operations at Seongsu, Bucheon and Bupyeong in April 2000. What remained of Anam Semiconductor joined the Dongbu group in 2002, and Korean Wikipedia traces it to the chipmaker later called DB HiTek. ANAM’s former television business, Anam Electronics, continued separately; Korean Wikipedia says it began in 1973 as a joint venture with Japan’s Matsushita and made Korea’s first colour televisions.

Expansion abroad followed. Amkor’s timeline lists packaging plants in Shanghai in 2001 and in Taiwan in 2001 and 2004; a joint venture called J-Devices, set up in Kyushu, Japan, in 2009 with Toshiba and NMD, which English Wikipedia says Amkor fully acquired in February 2016; NANIUM, a wafer-level fan-out packaging firm in Portugal, bought in May 2017; and a factory at Bac Ninh, Vietnam, inaugurated in October 2023. Through J-Devices it also took over plants in Japan from Fujitsu Semiconductor in 2012 and from Renesas in 2013, the company says, and in 2013 it bought Toshiba’s automotive semiconductor operation in Malaysia. English Wikipedia adds that Amkor bought the American test firm Integra Technologies in 2000 and spun it off in 2005, and that it opened a plant at Longtan Science Park in Taiwan in September 2018. In January 2024, the company says, it and GlobalFoundries opened a cooperation in Portugal aimed at Europe’s car industry. Its headquarters moved from West Chester, Pennsylvania, to Chandler, Arizona, in 2005, and to Tempe in February 2015, the company says. It now reports more than 30,000 employees at 20 manufacturing locations in 11 countries.

Its work, as English Wikipedia describes it, includes flip-chip packaging with copper pillar bumps, wire bonding, CMOS image sensors and antennas built into or onto the package. The company says that in 2010 it and Texas Instruments produced what it calls the world’s first 40-micron fine-pitch flip chip with copper pillars.

Packaging and test.

Chip packaging and test companies sit between the chipmaker and the finished device. The trade calls them OSATs, for outsourced semiconductor assembly and test: they take silicon made by others, mount it, connect it, seal it and check that it works. Their customers are other technology companies, so they rarely speak to the public, and their imagery is built for engineers, buyers and investors.

That imagery leans on close-ups. Company pages and annual reports return again and again to macro shots of packaged chips and the substrates beneath them, to fine arcs of gold or copper wire bonds linking a die to its frame, and to wafers catching the light. Methods carry the names that a consumer brand would give to products: flip chip, fan-out, system in package, 2.5D and chiplet packaging.

The second register is the factory. Rows of test handlers, operators in white cleanroom suits, and long, low factory campuses in places such as Kaohsiung, Penang and Jiangsu stand for scale and reliability. Plants are often known by codes and numbers rather than names, and maps of sites across Asia, Europe and the Americas do much of the storytelling. Trade shows such as SEMICON are where these companies meet their customers face to face.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it, where it works and what its record shows — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The palettes and type here are our own interpretation, not the companies’ marks.

A campus in Peoria.

Amkor’s newest project brings its work to the state where it is based. The company announced a packaging and test facility in Peoria, Arizona, in November 2023, signed a preliminary memorandum of terms with the US Department of Commerce in July 2024 and announced an expanded partnership with TSMC on advanced packaging in Arizona in October 2024, according to its timeline. Construction Dive reported on 10 October 2025 that Amkor had broken ground on the campus. The site had first been planned for a 56-acre parcel at the Five North development at Vistancia, in Peoria, and was moved to a 104-acre site at the Peoria Innovation Core because of the project’s larger scope. The campus is planned in two phases with more than 750,000 square feet of cleanroom space, and its customers include Apple and Nvidia, according to the company’s release as reported by Construction Dive. The first building was expected to be finished in mid-2027, with production beginning in early 2028.

The company has changed at the top as well. Its timeline says James Kim retired as executive chairman on 31 October 2024 and became chairman emeritus; Giel Rutten, the president and chief executive, spoke for the company at the Arizona groundbreaking. In November 2025, the company says, it also broke ground on an advanced testing facility in Incheon, South Korea.

For a design guide, Amkor shows how a supplier can carry its origin in its name: two countries joined in one word. Compare ASE Technology, the Kaohsiung packaging group, and TSMC, Amkor’s partner on packaging in Arizona. For this guide we use an oxide red, a graphite and a bond copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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