Macronix Brand Guidelines: Hsinchu’s 1989 NOR, NAND & ROM Maker

Forty engineers and a science park.

Macronix International was established in 1989 in the Science Park at Hsinchu, Taiwan, the company says; Chinese Wikipedia gives the date as 9 December 1989. Its Chinese name is 旺宏電子, and the company lists Macronix and MXIC among its trademarks.

Its founder is Miin Chyou Wu. In a February 2023 feature, EE Times Asia reported that Wu, then in his forties, started the company by bringing together about 40 engineers from Silicon Valley, and that he chose to combine design, production and sales under one roof rather than follow the contract-manufacturing route common in Taiwan at the time. The same feature describes an early arrangement with TSMC: the foundry paid for equipment installed at Macronix’s plant, and the output went to TSMC’s customers until Macronix had repaid it, about three years later.

EE Times Asia also lists some early products that sit outside memory, among them a design-automation tool called NOVA in 1991, 32-bit microprocessors, Ethernet controllers and controller chips for LCD screens and digital cameras. Today the company describes itself as a maker of non-volatile memory — chips that keep their data when the power is off.

The feature says Macronix was the first Taiwanese company to be listed on Nasdaq. At home, its shares have been listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange since 15 March 1995, according to Chinese Wikipedia. Wu still led the company in 2026 as chairman and chief executive, Kotaku reported in November 2026.

NOR, NAND and ROM, made in its own fabs.

Macronix describes itself as an integrated device manufacturer in non-volatile memory, offering “a full range of NOR Flash, NAND Flash, and ROM products” for consumer, communications, computing, industrial, automotive and networking customers. Its catalogue groups the range into serial and parallel NOR flash, the OctaBus family, SLC and serial NAND flash, e.MMC memory, the security-focused ArmorFlash, and ROM, including its XtraROM line.

Where the chips are made is stated plainly by the company: it owns one 12-inch wafer fab, Fab 5, and one 8-inch fab, Fab 2, and says it designs and fabricates its memory products in those two plants. Chinese Wikipedia says an older 6-inch fab was sold to Foxconn in August 2021.

EE Times Asia reported that Macronix became a ROM supplier to Nintendo, and English Wikipedia says the company has made memory for the Nintendo 3DS and Switch. In its overview the company also calls itself one of very few suppliers offering serial NOR flash from 512 kilobits to 2 gigabits, and says it announced a flash technology called BE-SONOS; those are its own descriptions. It adds that it has launched a 19-nanometre NAND flash and e.MMC family for embedded uses, and that its XtraROM products are made on a 32-nanometre process.

That ROM chapter is now closing. On 4 November 2026 Kotaku reported, drawing on the company’s third-quarter results presented on 27 October and a Taipei Times translation, that Macronix is phasing out ROM production. According to that report, ROM made up about 5 percent of sales in the third quarter of 2026, down from 26 percent in the second quarter of 2025, and Wu said the company would put more weight on NOR flash for data centres and allocate capacity to NAND. Kotaku described Macronix as Nintendo’s main ROM supplier for Switch cartridges, while noting it is not the only one.

How memory makers present themselves.

Memory chips are hard to show. A finished DRAM or flash die is a sliver of silicon sealed inside a black package, and the companies that make them sell mostly to other manufacturers rather than to the public. So memory makers tend to build their visual identity from the stages around the chip: the wafer, the module, the drive and the place where it all ends up.

The wafer is the most common image. A polished disc covered in a tight grid of identical dies, often lit so that the surface breaks into bands of colour, says “scale” and “precision” without needing a product name. Close-ups follow the chip outward: DRAM modules with rows of packages along a green board, SSD circuit boards with a controller and flash packages side by side, and cross-section diagrams that show memory cells stacked in layers, the shorthand for 3D NAND.

The factory is the second theme. Cleanroom corridors, staff in full-body suits and long rows of wafer-handling equipment appear in annual reports, recruitment pages and listing documents, usually photographed in cool, even light. At the other end of the chain come data-centre racks, banks of servers and drives that show where the memory is put to work.

Trade shows give the category its public stage. Memory and storage makers present new parts at events such as FMS, the Flash Memory Summit, and Computex in Taipei, where stands mix wafer displays, product cases and technical posters. Across these settings the typical register is a clean sans, a cool or dark palette with one bright accent, and diagrams in place of lifestyle photography; the guides in this series look at how each maker works within, or departs from, that pattern.

A memory maker that kept its own fabs.

Macronix’s public image is shaped less by consumer products than by engineering. The company points to technical papers presented at conferences such as IEDM and ISSCC and to a large patent portfolio, and it presents its work in the language of reliability, longevity and security, with product-longevity and known-good-die programmes listed alongside its catalogue. On governance and workplace standards it says the Corporate Governance Association awarded it CG6002 certification, and that it was the first semiconductor maker in the Hsinchu Science Park certified to the SA 8000 social-accountability standard; both are the company’s own statements.

Wu has also been recognised by the trade press: EE Times Asia reported in 2023 that he had received an Asia Best Executive of the Year award at its parent group’s second EE Awards Asia. The same feature presented Macronix as a firm that came through a difficult second decade before recovering, and that is now working on memory-centric computing with its FortiX 3D NAND and NOR technology.

In Kotaku’s account of the 2026 results, the company’s growth is now tied to NOR flash for data centres and to NAND, made in the two Hsinchu fabs under the integrated model Wu chose in 1989. By EE Times Asia’s account, the foundry TSMC helped equip Macronix in its first years.

For a design guide, Macronix shows how a component maker with no consumer face builds a brand on specifications, longevity and the plain fact of owning its fabs. Compare Winbond, another Taiwanese maker of NOR flash, and TSMC. For this guide we use a deep navy, a muted teal and a pale cleanroom grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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