Chroma ATE Brand Guidelines: Taoyuan, 1984, Power Supplies, Battery & Chip Testers

A test-equipment maker under the Chroma name.

Chroma ATE Inc. — in Chinese, 致茂電子 — is a Taiwanese maker of electronic test and measurement equipment, founded in 1984, as both the company and English Wikipedia state. The letters ATE stand for automatic test equipment, as the company’s United States arm spells out. A 2016 release from Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute, republished by the trade site Laserfair, says that its chairman, Leo Huang, co-founded Chroma ATE in 1984 to supply high-precision electronic test equipment and systems “under the brand name ‘Chroma’.” The same release reported that Huang had been ranked 38th in the Taiwan edition of Harvard Business Review’s list of best-performing chief executives.

The company’s own timeline shows how it grew out of Taiwan. It set up a United States company in 1993, was certified to ISO 9002 in 1994 and made its initial public offering in Taiwan in 1996. A factory in Shenzhen followed in 1998, a factory in Taoyuan and a European company in the Netherlands in 1999, and Chroma Systems Solutions in the United States in 2001. In 2004, its twentieth year, it opened a new headquarters in Taoyuan, and in 2006 a factory in Suzhou.

Chroma marked its 40th anniversary in 2024. Today the company describes itself as a supplier of “precision measurement and intelligent automation,” with the line “At Chroma, we advance excellence,” and says it believes in “the truth of measurements and the trust of partnerships.”

Power, batteries, chips and displays.

Chroma’s range is wide. Its website lists test solutions for power electronics, batteries and energy storage, electric vehicles, semiconductors and ICs, photonics, flat-panel displays, video and colour, passive components, electrical safety and automated optical inspection, together with manufacturing software for factories. English Wikipedia groups the same work into product divisions from power electronics and LED lighting to solar cells and laser testing, and describes Chroma as part of the Taiwan-based Chroma Group.

Power is one of the threads that runs through the catalogue. Its power electronics range includes DC power supplies such as the 62000D series of bidirectional DC power supplies won a Taiwan Excellence Award for 2023, the company says. For batteries it offers cell charge and discharge test systems and battery formation equipment, which its United States arm describes as regenerative, and test systems for energy storage and power conversion.

On the semiconductor side the company makes SoC and analogue test systems, burn-in systems and wafer metrology equipment. It says its 3650-S2 SoC/analogue test system was named Best Test & Measurement Product of the Year at the EE Awards Asia in 2023 and won a Taiwan Excellence Award for 2025, and that its 7980 2D/3D wafer metrology system won a Taiwan Excellence Gold Award for 2026. In a press release of March 2023, carried by Taiwan News, Chroma said it had shipped 3,500 semiconductor test systems worldwide since 2012.

The company has also built up its range through purchases, according to its own timeline: Zentech Technology in 2000, Sajet Technology and MAS Automation in 2007, Raster Opto-Mechatronics in 2009, Wise Life Technology in 2011 and, through Chroma Systems Solutions, QuadTech in 2012. In 2019 it invested in Camtek, and in 2022 it bought Environmental Stress Systems, a United States company, which Chinese Wikipedia also records.

Design and documentation.

Test and measurement companies sell instruments that most people never see, and their marketing is built around the screen. Product pages and brochures tend to lead with an oscilloscope display: a dark background, a fine grid of divisions and bright traces in yellow, cyan, magenta and green, each colour standing for a separate channel. The trace is the product’s face, so photographs are often cropped tight on the display rather than on the case around it.

The second familiar image is the laboratory. Signal and spectrum analysers, generators and power supplies appear stacked in racks or lined up on a bench, cables looping between front panels of knobs, soft keys and connectors. Engineers are shown probing a circuit board with a fine tip, reading a waveform while the device under test sits under a lamp or a magnifier. The tone is calm and technical, with product names and model numbers set in plain sans type.

Further along the chain, the pictures move into the factory. Semiconductor test makers show automated chip testers and handlers in clean production areas, staff in protective suits, and wafer probe cards photographed under magnification, where rows of needle-like contacts meet the pads of a chip. Network and wireless test companies favour antennas, fibre spools, base stations and phones in shielded boxes.

The category also meets its customers in person. Trade shows such as electronica in Munich, DesignCon in Santa Clara and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona are where new instruments are launched and demonstrated live, so stand design, demo screens and printed data sheets carry much of each brand’s visual identity. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it and where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

A founder-led company with a new chief executive.

Chroma is based in Taoyuan, where it says it moved and expanded its headquarters in 2020. The company describes offices and manufacturing facilities around the world; its timeline records factories in Taoyuan, Shenzhen and Suzhou and a factory site in Kaohsiung, opened with a branch there in 2010. It has subsidiaries or branches in Japan since 2008, Germany since 2017 and Korea since 2018, and in 2025 opened what it calls a Silicon Valley operation centre in Milpitas, California. Its United States arm is based in Irvine, California.

Leadership changed at the start of 2026. DIGITIMES reported in December 2025 that Chroma’s board had met on 3 December and approved I-Shih Tseng as president and chief executive from 1 January 2026, with the founder and chairman, Leo Huang, stepping down as chief executive. Tseng joined Chroma in 1998 and had led its integrated system solutions and optical inspection businesses, the report said.

The company also lists its recognition as a brand. It says Chroma has been included among the Best Taiwan Global Brands every year since 2019 and was ranked 24th in the 2025 list, and that the product demonstration room at its headquarters won a German iF Design Award in 2023. It reports certifications including ISO 9001 and ISO 13485, a TISAX assessment in 2025 and, in 2021, an SGS certificate to ISO 26262 ASIL-D for powertrain components, which it says was the first in Taiwan.

For a design guide, Chroma ATE shows how one brand name can stretch across very different test markets, from a laboratory power supply to a semiconductor production line, while the company keeps the same short word on every product. Compare Advantest and Teradyne, two makers of automatic test equipment for chips. For this guide we use a deep indigo, a cell green and a pale lab mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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