Advantest
More info
- Released
- 1954 (as Takeda Riken)
- Type
- Semiconductor test equipment
The test machines that, together with Teradyne, decide whether the world's chips pass — splitting the market almost evenly between them.
Advantest of Tokyo grew out of the instrument maker Takeda Riken (1954) and took its current name in 1985. Its product is automatic test equipment (ATE): cabinets that pump test patterns through every circuit and reject whatever fails, usually after the wafer has already been diced into individual chips.
Along with America's Teradyne, the company effectively owns the whole semiconductor-test market. Advantest is strongest in memory and SoC testers, and demand tracks every new process node and every new HBM stack: the more a chip costs to build, the more it costs to ship a broken one.