Kinsus Brand Guidelines: Pegatron’s IC Substrate Maker From Xinwu, Taoyuan

A substrate maker from its first year.

Kinsus began in 2000. Its full name is Kinsus Interconnect Technology Corp., and its own milestones page says the company was established in September 2000, set up a United States subsidiary the following month, and became a public company in June 2002. Its headquarters is its Shih-Lei factory in the Xinwu district of Taoyuan, in northern Taiwan; the American subsidiary is today in Santa Clara, California.

The early years read as a run of certifications and buildings. The company lists QS 9000 certification in July 2001 and ISO 14000 environmental management certification in December 2001. In 2003, it says, it was assessed by a review committee of Taiwan’s Industrial Development Bureau as a qualifying technology enterprise. In November 2004 its shares were listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, and in the same month it began building its second Xinwu plant, the Tsing-Hua factory, which started mass production in January 2006. In October 2005 it bought a flexible printed circuit board plant, and in March 2008 its plant in Suzhou, in China’s Jiangsu province, began mass production.

Kinsus belongs to a larger electronics group. In June 2020 the Taipei Times described it as a subsidiary of Pegatron, the Taiwanese contract assembler of iPhone and iPad products. The company’s shareholder page, with a base date of 29 March 2026, lists its three largest shareholders as Asus Investment, Asustek Investment and Asuspower Investment, and notes that all three are wholly owned by Pegatron; together they held about 37% of the shares.

The layer between chip and board.

An IC substrate is the small, dense board that sits between a chip and the main circuit board. Kinsus states its aim plainly: “to be the global leading IC substrate maker in technology and manufacturing.” It says its capabilities cover fine-line circuitry, ultra-thin substrates and complex structures, and that packaging methods such as BGA, CSP and flip-chip have become mainstream in the industry.

Its product pages name six substrate families and explain each. The PBGA, it says, is the most basic ball grid array substrate for wire-bond packaging, built from a copper-clad laminate of resin-impregnated glass fibre and suited to chips with very high pin counts. FCCSP, or flip-chip chip-scale packaging, has gained ground as smartphone processors need more pins. CSP substrates, the company says, became the main packaging technology for components inside handsets as devices grew thinner. SiP, or system-in-package, puts several different chips into one package, which Kinsus presents as an alternative to a single system-on-chip. It also lists RF module and FCBGA substrates.

The Taipei Times gave a dated picture of the business in June 2020. It reported that Kinsus made ABF substrates, built with Ajinomoto Build-up Film, BT substrates, made with a bismaleimide-triazine resin, and printed circuit boards; that new ABF capacity and graphics-processor orders from a US client were lifting sales; and that antenna-in-package projects for 5G phones were expected to be a growth driver. The same article noted the company’s Chinese subsidiary, Piotek Computer (Suzhou).

The same report gave the company’s own reading of demand at the time. Kinsus had said in an April 2020 earnings call that it expected the shortage of ABF substrates to last until the end of that year, because the industry’s move towards multi-core processors meant larger dies, which use more ABF capacity. A SinoPac Securities analyst quoted in the article named 5G smartphones, base stations and graphics processors as the main markets that would lift demand for both BT and ABF substrates.

Kinsus has also grown by adding companies and plants. Its milestones list the founding of Pegavision in August 2009, a merger with Piotek Computer in August 2010, the purchase of the Xing-Feng factory in Xinfeng, Hsinchu County, in March 2013, the founding of FuYang Technology in May 2016 and the purchase of the Youth factory in Yangmei, Taoyuan, in February 2021. Pegavision, which the Taipei Times described in 2020 as the group’s contact-lens business, was listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in October 2019, the company says.

Boards and substrates in Taiwan.

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.

Four plants in Taiwan, two companies in Suzhou.

Where Kinsus makes its products is set out on its locations page. In Taiwan it lists the Shih-Lei and Tsing-Hua factories in Xinwu, the Xing-Feng factory in Hsinchu County and the Youth factory in Yangmei. In China it lists two companies side by side in the export processing zone of the Suzhou New and Hi-tech District: Kinsus Interconnect Technology SuZhou and Piotek Computer (Suzhou).

Its own record of recognition leans on business rankings. The milestones page cites placings in CommonWealth Magazine’s annual list of Taiwan’s top manufacturers in most years from 2005 to 2015, a ranking among Business Weekly’s Asia top 150 companies in 2006, a place among Business Next’s top 100 Taiwanese technology companies in 2006, and selection for the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific list for 2012. Those are the company’s own listings of its awards.

For a design guide, Kinsus shows how a component maker that most people never see can still build a clear, single-purpose identity around one product category. Compare Nan Ya PCB and Unimicron, two other Taiwanese IC substrate makers. For this guide we use a substrate navy, a night ink and a pale wafer blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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