Elmos Brand Guidelines: A 1984 Dortmund Start-up, Car Chips & a Fab Sold to Littelfuse

A professor, two partners and the first tenant of a Dortmund science park.

Elmos began in Dortmund in 1984. In a press release for its 40th anniversary, dated 31 July 2024, the company says it was founded by Prof. Dr. Günter Zimmer, Dr. Klaus Weyer and Norbert Ellenberger as the first company in the Dortmund Technologiepark, with the aim of making customer-specific microchips in CMOS technology. Knut Hinrichs joined the management team in 1987, and, the company says, custom chips for BMW and other carmakers were the base of its early business.

English Wikipedia’s timeline adds that a four-inch wafer fab was installed in Dortmund in 1985 and that the company moved to a six-inch line by 1998. Elmos listed its shares in Frankfurt in 1999; the anniversary release calls that listing the financing for its next phase of growth, and the shares still trade in the Prime Standard under the code ELG, German Wikipedia says.

In March 2001 Elmos bought Silicon Microstructures, a Californian maker of silicon pressure sensors, from OSI Systems, according to English Wikipedia. It sold that business to TE Connectivity’s Measurement Specialties unit in 2019; TE said on 7 October 2019 that the purchase was complete, as cited by German Wikipedia. On 1 July 2020 the company became a European company, Elmos Semiconductor SE, and in January 2021 it bought the engineering-services firm Online Engineering, which develops hardware and software for electric drives, German Wikipedia says, citing Automobil Industrie.

The anniversary release credits Dr. Anton Mindl, chief executive from 2006 to 2020, with the turn towards application-specific standard products, more sales offices abroad and a network of outside manufacturing partners. Dr. Arne Schneider leads the company today.

Sensors, lights and motors in the car.

Elmos describes itself as a specialist in analog mixed-signal chips, mainly for cars. Its website groups the range into five segments — ranging, sensing, motor control, lighting, and safety and connectivity — and the 2024 anniversary release names ultrasonic distance measurement, LED rear lights, LED ambient light and motor-control and sensor chips as fields where it works, alongside custom chips for single customers. The company says that, on average, seven of its integrated circuits are found in every new car sold worldwide, a figure German Wikipedia repeats from the company’s own pages; German Wikipedia also names Audi as a customer, citing Automobil Industrie in 2019.

The work is mostly invisible to drivers. In a release of 20 October 2026, ahead of the electronica trade fair in Munich from 10 to 13 November, Elmos describes ultrasonic chips that help with parking and manoeuvring, sensor chips that measure pressure, temperature, rain and light, and lighting and motor-control parts, under the motto “We enable what matters.” The same release says it would show, for the first time, how its automotive chips could be used in humanoid robots.

Since giving up its own wafer production, Elmos relies on foundry partners. On 9 September 2026 it said it had signed an agreement with the South Korean foundry SK keyfoundry, its partner for 18 years on a 350-nanometre process, to extend the work to a 130-nanometre platform and secure capacity until 2037; the first product on it, a four-channel eFuse controller, is sampling, with series production planned for 2027, the company says.

Recognition has come from innovation prizes rather than design awards. On 9 November 2026 Elmos said its quantum random number generator, a chip in a package two millimetres square, had been named “European Innovator 2026” at a ceremony in Bonn, after winning the German Innovation Award earlier in the year.

Industry context.

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.

A blocked sale, a Chicago buyer and a move to Leverkusen.

The biggest change in the company’s recent history concerns its Dortmund wafer fab. In December 2021 Elmos agreed to sell it to Silex Microsystems, a Swedish MEMS foundry owned by the Chinese group Sai Microelectronics, German Wikipedia says. After a foreign-investment review, the German federal cabinet prohibited the sale on 9 November 2022, and the broadcaster n-tv reported in June 2023 that the government had cited the Foreign Trade and Payments Act.

A new buyer followed. On 28 June 2023 Elmos signed a contract to sell the fab to Littelfuse, the Chicago component maker; German regulators approved it in summer 2023, and Elmos said the transaction took effect at midnight on 31 December 2024, when Littelfuse took over Dortmund Semiconductor GmbH, the unit that held the fab. With that, Elmos said, its move to a fabless model was complete. A long-term supply agreement with Littelfuse had an initial term to 2029, and in September 2026 Elmos said it had extended the agreement to secure more wafer capacity from the Dortmund fab until at least 2028.

The head office moved too. The Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger reported on 7 January 2025 that the holding company had moved from Dortmund to Leverkusen, in Opladen, on 1 January, with about 15 staff; a company spokesman gave tax reasons and said Dortmund would remain its largest site. The company’s website now lists Leverkusen as headquarters and Dortmund as its main site, among 20 locations in 10 countries.

The founders are stepping back. On 2 July 2026 Elmos said Günter Zimmer and Klaus Weyer would leave the supervisory board at the end of 2026, with Zimmer staying on as honorary chairman, and that a shareholder meeting on 18 August 2026 would elect two successors.

For a design guide, Elmos shows a chipmaker whose identity rests on its name and its range of car chips rather than on a factory of its own. Compare Infineon, another German chipmaker with a large automotive business, and Littelfuse, which now owns the Dortmund fab. For this guide we use a slate blue, copper and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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