TTM Technologies Brand Guidelines: Time-to-Market, Viasystems & Defence Circuit Boards

A Washington start and a move to Orange County.

TTM Technologies is an American maker of printed circuit boards, radio-frequency components and defence electronics, with its head office in Santa Ana, California. It did not start there. English Wikipedia says the company was founded in 1998 by Kent Alder in Redmond, Washington, through the purchase of Pacific Circuits, and the Orange County Business Journal reported in April 2017 that TTM was established in 1998 through that acquisition in Washington state and moved to Santa Ana a year later after acquiring Power Circuits. The company’s own history page says TTM was incorporated in 1998 and describes the 1999 step as the merger of Pacific Circuits and Power Circuits.

The name is an abbreviation. TTM says it stands for “time-to-market,” the idea that its quick-turn design, engineering and manufacturing help customers bring new products out sooner. Its early boards, English Wikipedia says, went into routers, switches, servers and memory modules. TTM listed on Nasdaq under the ticker TTMI in 2000 and then grew largely by acquisition: Honeywell Advanced Circuits in 2002, which brought a large plant at Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and the Tyco Printed Circuit Group in 2006, which the company says made it North America’s largest supplier of boards to the aerospace and defence trade.

In 2010 TTM bought the circuit-board business of Hong Kong’s Meadville. The company says the deal doubled its size and made it a supplier of high-density interconnect (HDI) boards for smartphones and tablets, with a manufacturing base in Asia; the Orange County Business Journal reported in 2017 that roughly two-thirds of TTM’s boards were then made in China. Alder handed over to Tom Edman as president in 2013 and as chief executive in 2014, English Wikipedia says.

Viasystems, Anaren and Telephonics.

The largest step came in 2015, when TTM completed its purchase of Viasystems Group, the St. Louis board maker. The Orange County Business Journal wrote in 2017 that the deal created one of the world’s largest circuit-board makers, with about 30,000 employees and 28 plants in the United States and China; TTM says it took the company into high-reliability automotive boards. In 2018 it added Anaren, a designer of radio-frequency components and subsystems, and in 2019 it bought intellectual property from i3 Electronics, which TTM says brought substrate-like PCB technology.

Then the company narrowed its focus. In January 2020, Evertiq reported, TTM agreed to sell its four Chinese plants making boards for mobile phones — substantially all of its Mobility business unit — to a Chinese consortium, AKM Meadville; Edman said the cellular market had matured. In April 2020 Evertiq reported a plan to wind down two of the three Chinese plants of its electro-mechanical assembly unit, in Shanghai and Shenzhen, and to fold the third, which made backplane assemblies, into the board business.

In 2022 TTM agreed to buy Telephonics from Griffon. Washington Technology noted in April 2022 that Telephonics was founded in 1933 to make headphones and microphones for the US Navy and had belonged to Griffon since 1961; TTM says the deal added radar, identification friend-or-foe and communications systems to its range.

Today TTM describes its products as mission systems, RF components, microelectronic assemblies and “technologically advanced interconnect products,” among them conventional, HDI, flex and rigid-flex boards, RF and microwave boards and substrates. English Wikipedia lists defence plants across the United States and commercial plants in China, Canada, Penang in Malaysia and Switzerland, with engineering centres in Chippewa Falls, Guangzhou and Binghamton, New York.

Boards behind the brands.

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.

Defence boards, data-centre boards and more deals.

The defence side has long been central. The Orange County Business Journal described TTM in 2017 as the world’s largest circuit-board supplier to the US military, with boards in missiles, infrared sensors and surveillance equipment, and noted that the Viasystems deal had brought a defence plant in Anaheim. The data-centre side has grown since: in its third-quarter report of October 2026, TTM said data centre and networking had become its largest end market, driven by demand for artificial-intelligence hardware. On 12 October 2026 it announced a capacity expansion at four plants in China and at its plant in Penang, Malaysia, aimed at AI data-centre boards.

The company is still buying. In June 2026 TTM announced plans to acquire two European board makers: Swiss Technology Group of Zurich, formed in 2023 from GS Swiss and the Hofstetter Group and focused on small boards for medical devices, and ILFA of Hannover, a German maker of complex rigid, flexible and rigid-flex boards. In its October 2026 results TTM said it had completed the Swiss Technology Group purchase and that of Epiq Solutions; Evertiq then reported on 4 November 2026 that TTM had completed the ILFA purchase as well. On 19 October 2026 TTM also agreed to buy the Ophir Optics infrared-optics business from MKS, a deal it expects to close in the second quarter of 2027. The president and chief executive is Edwin Roks.

For a design guide, TTM Technologies shows how a board maker assembled from many plants presents itself as one engineering company, under a name that is itself a promise of speed. Compare Unimicron, the Taiwanese board and substrate maker, and Jabil, another American electronics manufacturer. For this guide we use a deep harbour navy, a pale laminate green and a copper orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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