Siltronic Brand Guidelines: Wacker’s 1953 Burghausen Silicon, a 2015 IPO & Singapore

A 10 mm crystal in a Bavarian chemical works.

Siltronic AG, a maker of hyperpure silicon wafers headquartered in Munich, traces its business to research into high-purity silicon that began in 1953 at Burghausen, in south-eastern Bavaria, inside the chemical company Wacker Chemie. Siltronic says the first high-purity silicon crystal made there that year measured just 10 mm across. Its company history lists the start of semiconductor production in 1958, the first float-zone facility in 1959 and the first silicon wafer in 1962.

The business became a company of its own in 1968, when Wacker founded Wacker-Chemitronic Gesellschaft für Elektronik-Grundstoffe mbH in Burghausen; English Wikipedia adds that Wacker had bought Monosilicon, a silicon producer in Los Angeles, in 1965. In 1978 Wacker Siltronic Corporation was founded in Portland, Oregon, the first site outside Germany; the company’s sites page dates the Portland production facilities to 1979. Wacker-Chemitronic made its first 200 mm wafers in 1984 and began research and development on 300 mm wafers in 1990, the company says.

The name followed the products. In 1994 and 1995 Wacker-Chemitronic set up Wacker Siltronic GmbH and transferred its wafer business to it. The company became a stock corporation in 1996, was renamed Wacker Siltronic AG in 2002 and took the name Siltronic AG in 2004, according to its own history; German Wikipedia gives the same broad sequence from Wacker-Chemitronic to Siltronic AG.

Burghausen, Freiberg, Portland and Singapore.

Siltronic makes polished and epitaxial silicon wafers with diameters up to 300 mm. English and German Wikipedia both say it grows crystals by the Czochralski and float-zone methods and offers wafers doped with boron, phosphorus, antimony and arsenic. The company describes its wafers as the basis for microprocessors, memory and power semiconductors, and says it holds nearly 2,000 patents and patent applications.

Production runs on three continents. At Burghausen, the company says, monocrystals are pulled and wafers up to 300 mm are made, and its central research and development is based there. In Freiberg, Saxony, it acquired in 1995 a business that traces its origins to the East German state-owned Spurenmetalle Freiberg, founded in 1957, where the first silicon crystal was pulled in 1963; a 300 mm wafer fab began production there in 2004. The company calls Freiberg one of the founding members of the Silicon Saxony industry network. In Portland, around 360 employees make 200 mm wafers from crystals grown at the German sites, it says.

Singapore is now its largest production site, the company says. Wacker Siltronic Singapore was founded in 1997 and its fab began production in 1999. In 2006 Siltronic formed a joint venture with Samsung to build a 300 mm fab there, which shipped its first wafers on 30 January 2008, and in 2014 Siltronic took a 78 percent majority of it, the company says. A second 300 mm fab in Singapore, whose foundation stone was laid in 2021, was commissioned at the start of 2024 and formally inaugurated in June 2024, Siltronic said in a press release dated 12 June 2024; the release names the Tampines Wafer Fab Park as its location and says the fab will be ramped to full capacity over several years.

Wafers and chip materials.

Silicon-wafer and chip-materials makers sell to a small number of very large customers, and their public image is built for engineers, investors and recruits rather than shoppers. Most of what they make never reaches a consumer’s hand: a polished wafer, a bottle of photoresist or a photomask is used up or hidden inside a chip long before anything is sold in a shop.

Their pictures tend to come from the factory floor. Corporate reports and websites in this field favour mirror-polished silicon wafers catching the light of a cleanroom, cylindrical crystal ingots drawn slowly out of a furnace, photolithography bays lit in amber to protect light-sensitive resists, and racks of high-purity chemical bottles. People appear mostly as technicians in full-body cleanroom suits, often called bunny suits, with only their eyes showing.

Names in this group often record a history. Shin-Etsu joins two old Japanese provinces, and SUMCO is an acronym of the company formed by a 1999 merger. The palettes in these guides are our own interpretations, not official colours.

The industry meets at its trade shows. SEMICON West in the United States, SEMICON Taiwan in Taipei and SEMICON Japan in Tokyo bring wafer, chemical and equipment suppliers onto the same floor as chipmakers, and booths there show the same vocabulary of wafers, ingots and cleanroom imagery. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it, where it makes its products — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A listing, a lapsed takeover and an independent course.

Siltronic stayed a wholly owned Wacker subsidiary until its stock-market debut. Its shares have traded in the Prime Standard of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since 11 June 2015 and joined the TecDAX index that December, German Wikipedia says. In 2017 Wacker sold a second block of shares and kept a minority of 30.8 percent, the company says. German Wikipedia lists the shareholders as of December 2025 as Wacker Chemie with 30.83 percent, HAL Investments with 15.1 percent and Sino-American Silicon Products, the parent of GlobalWafers, with 13.67 percent.

GlobalWafers had earlier tried to buy the whole company. In December 2020 Taiwan’s GlobalWafers announced an offer for Siltronic, the Taipei Times reported. China’s market regulator said on 21 January 2022 that it would give conditional approval, but Germany’s economy ministry did not complete its investment review before the deadline of 31 January 2022, and the deal collapsed, Reuters reported. A ministry spokesperson said not all review steps could be completed, in particular the review of the Chinese antitrust approval, granted only the week before, and the ministry said it would review again if GlobalWafers made a new attempt. Wacker said it still planned to sell its 30.8 percent stake in the medium term, the Taipei Times reported on 2 February 2022. Siltronic remained an independent listed company.

On its website Siltronic presents itself under the line “perfect silicon solutions,” and its history page tells the company’s story through dates and diameters, from a 10 mm crystal in 1953 to 300 mm wafers.

For a design guide, Siltronic shows how a corporate research project can become a listed company while keeping its founding works at the centre of its story. Compare GlobalWafers, the Taiwanese wafer maker whose bid lapsed in 2022, and Shin-Etsu Chemical, another chemical group in the wafer business. For this guide we use a slate, a crystal grey and a copper with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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