Unimicron Brand Guidelines: A 1990 UMC Group Board Maker, Phoenix Precision & IC Substrates

A 1990 company and a run of mergers.

Unimicron Technology Corporation, 欣興電子 in Chinese, is a Taiwanese maker of printed circuit boards and IC carriers, or substrates, with its head office in the Guishan district of Taoyuan. The company dates its founding to 25 January 1990. Chinese Wikipedia says it was formed when an earlier company in the same group was reorganised and renamed, and that it belongs to the group of United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), the chip foundry. The Liberty Times reported in February 2026 that Unimicron described itself as part of the UMC group and UMC as its long-standing major shareholder.

Its early growth came through mergers within that group. The company’s milestone list says it introduced total quality management in 1996, listed on Taiwan’s over-the-counter market in December 1998, merged with UniMicron Technology Corp. and Bestmult Industry in October 2001, absorbed its Kunshan board subsidiary in March 2002 and moved to the Taiwan Stock Exchange in August 2002. Chinese Wikipedia describes the 2001 step as a restructuring of the UMC group’s board businesses, with Unimicron as the surviving company.

The company also lists quality and sustainability prizes, among them a National Quality Award in Taiwan in 2005 and the Deming Application Prize from Japan in 2011, and a run of corporate sustainability report awards from 2015 to 2023.

Phoenix Precision and the carrier business.

The turn towards chip packaging came in December 2009, when Unimicron merged with Phoenix Precision Technology, an IC-substrate maker, in a share swap. Chinese Wikipedia says the merger split the company into a PCB business unit and a Carrier business unit; Unimicron now describes three units, for boards, carriers and IC testing. The Liberty Times called it a leader in IC substrates in 2026.

On the board side, the company lists HDI and any-layer (ELIC) boards, multilayer boards, rigid-flex boards and flexible circuits, and says it is a major supplier of HDI boards for advanced mobile phones. On the carrier side it lists flip-chip ball-grid-array (FCBGA), flip-chip chip-scale (FCCSP), CSP and coreless substrates — the layers that sit between a chip and the board beneath it. Its product pages also list less obvious lines: glass and film touch panels, electrochromic mirrors, connector products and IC burn-in and test services, alongside design and simulation help for customers working on thermal, electromagnetic and RF problems. In May 2024 the Central News Agency reported the company as saying that AI-related products, with strong demand for ABF substrates, were its main source of growth.

The group has kept reshaping itself. Chinese Wikipedia says that in September 2009 Unimicron joined BlueBay in investing in the German board maker RUWEL, which made boards for cars and industry; the company now lists a plant at Geldern in Germany, and another at Eniwa in Hokkaido, Japan. It spun its rigid-flex business off as Qun Hong Technology in 2015 and merged it back in July 2023, and it completed a merger with its substrate affiliate Subtron Technology on 1 January 2025, Chinese Wikipedia says. One side venture stands apart: an LED-lit indoor vegetable farm, registered as Unifresh in 2014, which Chinese Wikipedia says was set up to supply staff canteens.

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.

Taoyuan plants, China, and a move to Thailand.

Unimicron says its main manufacturing bases are in Taiwan, at Taoyuan and Hsinchu, and in China, at Shenzhen, Huangshi, Kunshan and Suzhou, with the Chinese plants focused on mass production and the Taiwanese ones on high-end products. Thailand is the newest base, and the company’s own list of manufacturing sites now includes a Thai plant beside those in Germany and Japan. KrASIA reported in September 2025 that Unimicron was among the board makers setting up there, and that chairman T J Tseng said it had secured land for up to five plants, starting with boards for satellites and gaming consoles.

Its plants have had setbacks. The Central News Agency reported that a fire broke out at Unimicron’s Luzhu plant in Taoyuan on 21 May 2024, with no injuries and some production lines damaged; it was the company’s fourth fire since October 2020, the previous one in August 2023, and the company said it would speed up risk improvements. In August 2026, the United Daily News reported, prosecutors in Taoyuan searched Unimicron’s head office and its Hejiang plant over suspicions that boards made in mainland China had been relabelled as made in Taiwan; staff were questioned and released on bail while the investigation continued, and no outcome had been reported at the time of writing.

Leadership changed in 2026. The Liberty Times reported on 24 February 2026 that the board named S. C. Chien (簡山傑), a co-president of UMC, as chairman after Tseng retired.

For a design guide, Unimicron shows how a group-owned supplier, little known outside the trade, presents a long list of board and substrate types as one industrial identity. Compare TTM Technologies, the American board maker, and Nan Ya PCB, another Taoyuan substrate maker. For this guide we use a deep solder-mask teal, a pale jade and a gold-finger yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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