Ibiden Brand Guidelines: A 1912 Ogaki Power Company Turned IC Package Substrate Maker

A power company on the Ibi River.

Ibiden began in Ogaki, in Gifu Prefecture, as a power company. Japanese Wikipedia, which draws on the company’s own 70-year history published in 1982, says it was founded on 25 November 1912 as Ibigawa Electric Power to develop hydroelectric power on the Ibi River, with Yujiro Tachikawa as its first president and its head office in Tokyo. The company’s English chronology says the inaugural meeting was held in Ogaki town. Its first power station, at Nishi-Yokoyama, began supplying electricity in December 1915, Japanese Wikipedia says; the company’s chronology dates the start of transmission to 1916.

Spare power soon went into industry. In 1917 the company opened an electrochemical plant in Ogaki and began making carbide and ferroalloys; in 1918 it merged with sister companies as Ibigawa Denka, and in 1921 it became Ibigawa Denki. From 1922 to 1928 it also ran a railway, the line that is now the Yoro Railway Yoro Line, which it electrified in 1923 before handing it on. In 1922 it opened a carbon plant, and the company says it made carbons for Sperry-type searchlights there, with the navy designating the plant as its main source of them in 1927. In 1926 the firm came under Toho Electric Power, one of the large utilities of the day.

The war years reshaped the business. The company took the name Ibigawa Electric Industry in December 1939. On 1 April 1942, under Japan’s wartime controls on electricity, it contributed one power station to the state-backed generator Nippon Hatsusoden and another, with its supply business, to Chubu Haiden, the forerunner of Chubu Electric Power; it kept three stations to run its own plants, Japanese Wikipedia says. In June 1942 it came under the textile company Dainippon Spinners, now Unitika, which contributed the Aoyanagi plant in 1943; the company says searchlight carbons were made there until 1945. The head office moved from Tokyo to Ogaki in December 1944. After the war the company turned to carbons for cinema projection and other uses. In 1946 it was designated a restricted company under the occupation rules and left the Dainippon Spinners group, and in 1949 its shares were listed in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya.

From carbide and boards to substrates.

For decades Ibiden made chemicals and building materials. The company’s chronology lists calcium cyanamide from 1935, fused phosphate fertiliser from 1950 and a melamine decorative board sold as IBI-BOARD from 1960. A printed wiring board project team followed in 1970, an Electric Circuits Division in 1973 and the ceramic fibre IBI-Wool in 1974. Japanese Wikipedia says the oil shocks of the 1970s moved its main business from electric-furnace products to electronic parts, and that the Tokyo Stock Exchange reclassified it from chemicals to electrical equipment in 1994. In November 1982, its 70th anniversary year, the company took the name Ibiden.

The substrate business dates from 1987, when the company says it began making plastic IC package substrates, the multilayer boards that carry a chip and connect it to a main board; production started at its Gama plant the following year, and a US sales company opened in 1987. Japanese Wikipedia says Ibiden supplies semiconductor packages, including interposers, to Intel and other chipmakers, and that it developed its own additive process for making boards, called AAP/10, alongside the conventional subtractive method. The company lists mobile-phone boards from 1992 and high-volume production of FVSS, an all-layer stacked board, from 2004.

The ceramics side grew in parallel. Ibiden says it was the first in the world, in 1999, to put a diesel particulate filter into practical use in a passenger car, and it went on to make silicon-carbide filters in France and Hungary; it says the French unit was liquidated in June 2023 after production was consolidated in Hungary. Today the company lists its products as IC package substrates, SiC-DPF, substrate holding mats, specialty graphite, high-temperature insulation wool and battery materials for electric vehicles. Japanese Wikipedia notes that Ibiden belongs to Kyohokai, the association of Toyota’s parts suppliers, and that it announced a capital and business tie-up with Denso in 2017.

How the category presents itself.

Printed circuit boards sit inside almost every electronic product, yet the companies that make them rarely sell to the public. Their brands are written for engineers, buyers and investors, and their pictures tend to come from a short, shared list: a green or black board lit from the side so that its copper traces catch the light, a macro shot of vias and solder pads, or the gold-plated contact fingers along a board’s edge.

The factory is the other recurring subject. Board makers show long plating lines, rows of drilling machines, clean rooms and inspection stations, because scale and process are what they are selling. Flexible circuits get their own pose — a thin amber strip curled over a fingertip — while makers of IC substrates, the fine-lined carriers that sit between a chip and its board, tend to show close-ups of dense, glossy panels rather than finished products.

Names are often short and technical: TTM Technologies, for one, says its initials stand for “time-to-market.” Few makers publish formal colour standards, so the palettes in these guides are our own reading of the trade’s materials — the green of solder mask, the dark of laminate, the warm metal of copper and gold — rather than any company’s specification.

The trade meets at its own shows. The TPCA Show in Taipei gathers Taiwan’s board and substrate makers and their suppliers, and the electronica fairs, in Munich and elsewhere, bring board makers together with the component and equipment trade; TTM Technologies, for one, announced that it would exhibit at electronica India in Bangalore in 2026. The makers in this guide are spread across the United States, Taiwan, mainland China, Japan and Europe, and several of them run plants in more than one of those places.

A wheel, an arrow and two blues.

Most of Ibiden’s substrates are made in Gifu Prefecture. In a June 2025 interview with The Yomiuri Shimbun, president Koji Kawashima said the company made IC package substrates at three plants there, Ogaki, Ogaki Central and Aoyanagi, and that its new Ono plant would make substrates for AI servers in data centres, mainly shipped to Nvidia; he added that some production at Ogaki Central, which once made substrates for Intel, had moved to AI-server products. Evertiq reported in October 2025 that the Ono plant held its opening ceremony on 10 October 2025: the site was acquired in September 2021, construction began in December 2022 and the building was completed in January 2025, with mass production, mainly for AI servers, to begin in stages from October 2025. Abroad, the company set up IBIDEN Philippines for package substrates in 2000 and IBIDEN Electronics Malaysia for boards in 2008, and it transferred its Beijing board business in June 2023. In 2025, it says, its shares joined the Nikkei 225 index for the first time.

Ibiden’s visual identity points back to its origins, according to the company. For its 100th anniversary it renewed its logo mark for the first time in 30 years. The mark, the “IBIDEN Cycle,” is a wheel with an arrow, which the company says stands for synergy among people around the world and for progress rising in a spiral. It describes the dark blue of the IBIDEN wordmark as expressing innovation and trust, and the light blue of the cycle as a reference to its beginnings in hydroelectric power and water. Japanese Wikipedia notes that the company still runs three hydroelectric stations on the Ibi River and its tributary, the Sakauchi River.

For a design guide, Ibiden shows how a company can carry a century-old origin story, power from a river, into the identity of a maker of chip packages. Compare Intel, a substrate customer named by Japanese Wikipedia and by Ibiden’s president, and Nvidia, which he named as the main customer for the Ono plant. For this guide we use a deep navy, a river blue and a carbon grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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