Novatek Brand Guidelines: UMC’s 1997 Spin-Off Behind Display Driver Chips

A business unit becomes a company.

Novatek — in full Novatek Microelectronics Corp. — was established in May 1997 in the Hsinchu Science Park in northern Taiwan, the company says. Chinese Wikipedia says it began as the commercial products business unit of the design side of United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), the Taiwanese foundry, and that its chairman, T.S. Ho, led a team of more than 120 people into the new company. The company names T.S. Ho as chairman today.

The name needs care. In English, “Novatek” is also the name of a Russian natural-gas producer, an unrelated company; the Taiwanese chip designer is a different business, known in Chinese as 聯詠科技.

Its first products were chips for computer peripherals. Chinese Wikipedia says Novatek was at one time a large supplier of keyboard and mouse controllers, decided in 1999 to move into driver chips for liquid-crystal panels, and after 2000 shifted its focus to LCD driver ICs and system-on-chip products. On its own website Novatek describes itself as specialising in “display driver ICs & SoC solutions” for flat-panel displays and for audio and video in digital devices.

The listing date differs between sources. The company says it was listed on the main board of the Taiwan Stock Exchange in August 2002; Chinese Wikipedia gives 2001. Chinese Wikipedia adds that from 2003 Novatek set up subsidiaries in mainland China and Japan, and that at the end of 2007 it announced the purchase of Cheertek, a company backed by Winbond, which brought set-top box, digital photo frame and DVD player lines. In 2006, Chinese Wikipedia says, Novatek was named one of five Taiwanese companies that had ranked in the top 100 on a set of eight financial indicators for five years running.

Driver chips for every kind of screen.

A display driver IC is the chip that tells each row and column of a flat panel what to show. In February 2020 the Taipei Times described Novatek as a company “which makes driver ICs for flat-panel displays,” and in May 2024 as one that “specializes in driver ICs for displays.” Alongside driver chips, the paper reported, Novatek sells system-on-chip products for televisions and touch and display driver integration chips, known as TDDI, for smartphones.

Its milestone list for 2025 shows how far the range now reaches: driver chips for OLED televisions, notebook panels and smartphone screens, a timing controller for car instrument clusters and electronic rear-view mirrors, a microOLED panel driver aimed at AR glasses, power-management chips for DDR5 memory, and an edge AI chip for cameras, recorders and storage boxes, all as the company describes them.

Like other fabless designers, Novatek depends on foundries for its wafers. The Taipei Times reported in May 2024 that UMC was its long-term foundry partner and held a 2.7 percent stake in the company, and that Novatek planned to use 22-nanometre technology for OLED TDDI chips. In October 2025, the company says, it introduced a chip made on TSMC’s 4-nanometre process for its custom-chip service.

In the same 2024 report the company said it had joined Arm’s design ecosystem in February that year as part of a plan to grow its application-specific IC business. Earlier, in February 2020, the company told investors it expected shipments of its TDDI chips to grow that year as new smartphones adopted OLED screens, the paper reported, and in May 2024 it said customers were restocking TV chips ahead of major sporting events, including the Paris Olympics.

Television remains a thread through the milestones. In February 2025, the company says, it introduced a new smart-TV system-on-chip for mainstream 2K sets, and in January 2025 a touch and display chip for car centre displays of up to 15.6 inches.

How fabless chip designers present themselves.

A fabless chip designer has an unusual problem for a brand: its product is a small, dark square that most buyers never see. The company designs the chip, an outside foundry makes the wafers, and the finished part disappears inside someone else’s phone, television, router or car. The visual language of the category grows out of that gap between what the company makes and what anyone can look at.

One answer is the rendering. Chips appear floating above circuit-board landscapes, lit from below, with traces running off toward the horizon like roads seen from the air. Another is the die photograph: a close view of the silicon itself, often tinted in false colour so that memory blocks, processor cores and interfaces read as separate districts on a map.

A third answer is to show the products the chip ends up in. Reference designs — earbuds, security cameras, smart speakers, displays, small smart-home gadgets — let a designer point to a finished object without claiming it as its own. Developer kits and evaluation boards, photographed on desks next to laptops and cables, speak to the engineers who choose components.

The calendar matters too. Much of the category’s public presentation happens at trade shows such as CES in Las Vegas, Computex in Taipei, Embedded World in Nuremberg and the Hot Chips conference, where booths, demo walls and technical papers carry the brand. Many press releases follow the same rhythm, dated from headquarters and timed to a show. The guides that follow look at how individual companies work within these conventions, and at what can be documented about each one.

A science-park company with offices across Asia.

Novatek is still headquartered in the Hsinchu Science Park, with Steve Wang as president, the company says; the Taipei Times photographed its logo at the Tai Yuen Hi-Tech Industrial Park in Hsinchu County in November 2021. The company lists subsidiaries in Tokyo, Hong Kong and several mainland Chinese cities, including Shanghai, Shenzhen and Wuhan, and names UMC as a major shareholder.

China matters to the business. In February 2020 the Taipei Times reported that Novatek had about 400 employees in China, mostly software developers, and that Wuhan was an important manufacturing site for Chinese flat-panel displays. The company said then that its wafer suppliers and its chip assembly and testing partners were reallocating capacity to Taiwan from China. The company says it employs a little over 4,000 people in all.

Novatek also notes a customs milestone: on 29 May 2015, it says, it became the first IC design company in Taiwan to receive Authorised Economic Operator certification from the Customs Administration of the Ministry of Finance.

Its milestone pages are written in panel sizes, refresh rates and process nodes rather than slogans.

For a design guide, Novatek shows how a chip brand can sit unseen behind almost every screen. Compare MediaTek, another chip designer that grew out of UMC, and Himax, a Taiwanese maker of display driver chips. For this guide we use a deep violet, a teal and a pale lilac with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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