Diodes Brand Guidelines: A 1959 Discretes Maker, Zetex, Lite-On & Plano

A company named after its first parts.

Diodes Incorporated was incorporated in California in 1959 and reincorporated in Delaware in 1968, according to English Wikipedia. The name describes the kind of part it is known for: discrete semiconductors such as diodes, rectifiers and transistors. Today it is headquartered in Plano, Texas, and listed on Nasdaq under the ticker DIOD; its press releases carry a Plano dateline. Wikipedia’s article on Zetex describes Diodes as Dallas-based in 2008.

Its history is tied to Taiwan’s Lite-On group. Before 2020, Lite-On Semiconductor Corporation, listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, held about 14.7 per cent of Diodes’ shares, Diodes said in a release dated 30 November 2020 announcing that it had completed the purchase of Lite-On Semiconductor. The company said the deal gave it what it called a leadership position in glass-passivated bridges and rectifiers, and added wafer-fabrication and assembly-and-test capacity; buying the Taiwanese company let it take back the Diodes shares that company had held.

Leadership has passed from one long-serving chief to his successor. eeNews Europe named Dr. Keh-Shew Lu as Diodes’ chairman, president and chief executive in 2022. When Diodes announced in December 2023 that Gary Yu would become president from January 2024, it said Lu would remain chairman and chief executive until at least May 2027. In May 2025 it named Yu chief executive instead, with Lu continuing as chairman of the board, according to Wikipedia.

Growth by buying companies and fabs.

Diodes grew through acquisitions, several of them factories. In 2008 it bought Zetex Semiconductors of Oldham, near Manchester. Zetex began as part of Ferranti Semiconductor and took its name from Ferranti’s ZTX series of bipolar transistors; it was sold to Plessey in 1988, bought by its management in 1989 as Zetex plc, with two manufacturing sites in Oldham, Gem Mill and Lansdowne Road, later became part of Telemetrix, and was renamed Zetex Semiconductors in 2004, English Wikipedia says. Its products were discrete semiconductors, chiefly diodes and transistors, the same kind of parts Diodes was named after. eeNews Europe described the plant that came with Zetex as a former Ferranti fab in Manchester.

More purchases followed, according to Wikipedia: Power Analog Microelectronics in 2012; Pericom Semiconductor in 2015; Texas Instruments’ wafer fab at Greenock in Scotland in 2019; Lite-On Semiconductor in 2020; and Fortemedia, completed in the last quarter of 2024. eeNews Europe noted in 2022 that the Greenock plant had earlier belonged to National Semiconductor, which Texas Instruments bought in 2011.

The Greenock purchase, known inside the company as GFAB, was completed in early April 2019, eeNews Europe reported on 4 April 2019. Diodes took on all of the plant’s employees, offered permanent jobs to 18 contractors who had supported it, and agreed to keep making Texas Instruments’ analog products there under a multi-year wafer supply agreement while TI moved that work to its own fabs. The same report gave the site as covering 318,782 square feet, and quoted Lu tying the deal to the company’s growth plans, which the report linked to the automotive and industrial markets.

In February 2022 Diodes agreed to buy onsemi’s wafer fab at South Portland, Maine, known as SPFAB. eeNews Europe reported on 1 March 2022 that the plant had opened in 1997 under National Semiconductor, had 85,000 square feet of clean room on a 20-acre campus, ran 200mm wafers and covered analog CMOS, BCDMOS, bipolar and silicon-carbide epitaxy processes, and that the purchase would add 200mm capacity for analog products aimed at the automotive and industrial markets. The sale was part of onsemi’s plan to slim its own manufacturing network, and closing was expected in the second quarter of 2022, the same report said. The purchase was completed on 3 June 2022, including the transfer of the fab’s employees, Wikipedia says.

Chips, wafers and the power trade.

Analog and power chipmakers sell parts that most people never see. Their products sit inside chargers, cars, motor drives and power supplies, usually as small black packages soldered to a board, so the industry’s visual language has to make something tiny and hidden look solid and precise. The usual answer is the macro photograph: a packaged chip or a power module shot close up against a dark or plain ground, its leads and markings sharp and its edges lit like an object in a catalogue.

Materials are the second subject. Makers that work with silicon carbide tend to show the wafer itself, a thin disc that often looks faintly green or amber under studio light, while gallium-nitride and silicon makers show wafers patterned with rows of dies. These images stand in for the factory, which tends to appear as clean-room suits and wafer carriers rather than as a building.

The third subject is the application. Power-chip makers lean heavily on electric-car chargers, inverters, solar installations and data-centre racks, because those are where their parts do visible work. Closer to the engineer, the pictures shift to evaluation boards on lab benches, probes and cables, and oscilloscope traces showing a clean switching edge — an image that speaks to the people who will design the chip in.

Trade shows complete the picture. Europe’s electronica in Munich and PCIM in Nuremberg, and APEC in the United States, are where many of these companies set out their stands, demonstration boards and new packages each year. In each of these settings the hardware and the technical data are meant to carry the message, with the brand kept to a name on the stand and the board.

Discrete, analog and mixed-signal parts.

Diodes describes itself as a maker of discrete, analog and mixed-signal products, with what it calls leading-edge packaging technology, for the consumer electronics, computing, communications, industrial and automotive markets. Wikipedia lists the range as diodes, rectifiers, transistors and MOSFETs; amplifiers and comparators; Hall-effect and temperature sensors; and power-management parts including LED drivers, AC-DC and DC-DC converters and voltage regulators. In January 2024, Wikipedia adds, it announced three dual-channel power switches.

In its November 2020 release the company said it had worldwide operations across 28 sites, covering engineering, testing, manufacturing and customer service. The wafer fabs named by eeNews Europe in 2022 were Greenock in Scotland and the former Ferranti plant near Manchester, with South Portland in Maine added that June. Wikipedia counts about 8,000 employees in 2025, and lists Diodes as a component of the S&P SmallCap 600 and Russell 2000 indices.

For a design guide, Diodes shows a company whose name still points to its first kind of product more than sixty years and many acquisitions later. Compare onsemi, which sold Diodes its South Portland fab, and Texas Instruments, which sold it the Greenock plant. For this guide we use a deep navy, a cool silver and a muted orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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