CEO Interview with Bob Owen of Owens Design

Bob Fung is the CEO of Owens Design, a Silicon Valley company specializing in the design and build of complex equipment that powers high-tech manufacturing. Over his 22-year tenure, Bob has led the development of more than 200 custom systems for world-class companies across the semiconductor, biomedical, energy, and emerging tech sectors, solving their most demanding equipment challenges. Under his leadership, Owens achieved a 10x revenue increase while maintaining a 100% delivery record, reflecting its engineering excellence and unwavering customer commitment.

Tell us about your company

At Owens Design, our story began in 1983 with a bold vision: to build a company where world-class engineers and technicians collaborate seamlessly to design and manufacture the next generation of high-tech equipment. Today, that vision is realized through our legacy of delivering over 3,000 custom tools across various industries, including semiconductors, renewable energy, medical devices, hard disk drives, and emerging technologies. We are proud to maintain a 100% on-time delivery record, a testament to our culture of precision, partnership, and performance.

What sets Owens Design apart is our deep understanding of complex equipment engineering, our ability to design production-ready prototypes and rapidly scale manufacturing to meet our customer’s growth. Our customers don’t just come to us to design equipment; they come to us to co-develop future-proof solutions. We offer turnkey services that span custom design, precision engineering, prototyping, pilot builds, and scalable manufacturing. This integrated approach minimizes risk, compresses development cycles, and enables rapid ramp-up for production in fast-evolving markets.

What problems are you solving?

At Owens Design, we help high-tech innovators turn intellectual property (IP) into fab-ready systems and enable new processes with production-capable equipment that scales. We focus on sectors that require precision, speed, and scalability, where standard solutions often don’t suffice.

Across the semiconductor and electronics manufacturing sectors, the increasing complexity of products is reshaping equipment requirements. Advanced technologies such as chiplet integration, 3D packaging, and heterogeneous system design, demand highly customized tools that can meet exact standards for precision, reliability, and integration capability.

At the same time, companies face compressed development timelines and pressure to bring new solutions to market faster. Owens Design addresses these needs by engineering application-specific equipment that enables breakthrough innovations, which are tightly aligned with each customer’s performance and production goals.

As the industry shifts toward more regionalized manufacturing and supply chain resilience, companies are reevaluating their approach to equipment strategy. There is a growing need for agile, scalable platforms that can adapt to rapidly changing product roadmaps and evolving production environments. We support that transition by working closely with our clients’ R&D and operations teams, acting as an extension of their organization to deliver complex tools on accelerated timelines while maintaining the engineering rigor that’s core to their success.

What are your strongest application areas?

Being rooted in Silicon Valley, we’ve grown alongside the semiconductor industry and built deep expertise in the design of complex equipment. Many of our customers are semiconductor OEMs, ranging from early-stage startups to Tier-1 equipment manufacturers, who are looking to bring advanced, high-precision systems to market quickly. They turn to us not just because we understand the technical demands of semiconductor tools but because we consistently deliver on tight timelines with the engineering depth, domain knowledge and execution reliability they need.

As Silicon Valley has evolved into a hub for a broader range of advanced technologies, Owens Design has evolved with it. Today, we apply the same level of rigor and creativity to automation challenges in renewable energy, data storage, medical devices, and emerging tech. These projects often involve highly specialized needs, such as advanced laser processing, precision robotics, or the automated handling of fragile materials. In many cases, standard solutions don’t meet the requirements, and that’s where our broad technical experience becomes essential.

What connects all of our work is the ability to take on complex programs while moving quickly and maintaining high quality. Our development process is designed to compress timelines and give customers confidence from concept through production. For over 40 years, we’ve maintained a 100% delivery record by a focusing on areas where we can deliver exceptional results and a commitment to meet our customer’s needs. That combination of discipline and engineering versatility is what continues to set Owens Design apart.

What keeps your customers up at night?

For semiconductor OEMs, whether they’re early-stage startups or established Tier-1 OEMs, the pressure to move fast while getting it right the first time is intense. They’re trying to bring highly complex systems to market on aggressive timelines, and every delay or design misstep can have real commercial consequences. What we hear most often is concern about bridging the gap between a promising concept and a reliable, production-ready tool, especially when resources are limited, and there is no room for second chances.

These teams aren’t just looking for a contract manufacturer; they’re seeking a partner who thoroughly understands semiconductor equipment. Someone who can engage early, ask the right questions and design a system that meets both performance specs and production realities. Reputation matters in this space. If you’re a startup, getting into the fab with a tool that doesn’t perform can be a deal breaker. And if you’re a Tier-1 company, quality and consistency are non-negotiable across your entire roadmap.

That’s why we place such a strong emphasis on early alignment. We work closely with customers to de-risk development from day one, bringing decades of domain expertise, a proven process, and a sense of urgency that matches theirs. Ultimately, it’s about giving them the confidence that they’ll reach the market quickly with a system that works, scales, and earns the trust of their end users.

What does the competitive landscape look like, and how do you differentiate?

The equipment development space is becoming increasingly specialized as technologies grow more complex and timelines get tighter. While there are many players offering contract manufacturing or niche engineering services, very few are structured to provide proper end-to-end support from early design definition through to production-ready delivery. That’s where Owens Design stands apart.

What differentiates us is our ability to engage early in the product lifecycle, even when requirements are still evolving, and carry that design through to a production-ready, scalable tool. Many other service providers are either focused on early-stage prototyping or late-stage manufacturing. However, few can bridge both sides with the same level of technical depth and delivery reliability. Owens Design has the ability to close the gap.

What new features/technology are you working on?

We’re focused on adding value to our customers, working on new ways to address what they need most. In the semiconductor capital equipment space, we’re receiving a strong message that customers need to get to market even faster and require assistance with navigating their customers’ expectations and fab requirements, including SEMI spec compliance, particle control, vibration control, and fab interface software. With artificial intelligence accelerating the advanced packaging market, we’re seeing many new technologies being developed to help improve yield. There is a high interest in our experience with developing Inspection and Metrology equipment to help new technologies get into production quickly, which has led us to our most recent initiative, called PR:IME™. This new platform accelerates the commercialization of these technologies.

What is the PR:IME platform, and how does it accelerate the development of semiconductor inspection and metrology tools?

The idea behind PR:IME came from a recurring challenge we’ve observed over the years: the time it takes to bring inspection and metrology tools from concept to something ready for deployment in a fab. For most tool developers, every new system starts as a clean sheet, custom mechanics, software, controls, and wafer handling, and that means long lead times and a lot of engineering effort spent on non-differentiating components.

We asked ourselves: What if we could take some of that burden off their plate? PR:IME is our answer to that. It’s a modular platform with standardized mechanical, electrical, and software interfaces. A flexible foundation that lets customers plug in their core IP while we handle the rest. That way, teams can focus on what makes their technology unique, not on reinventing basic infrastructure.

One of the things we’re most excited about is its scalability. For R&D environments, a manual wafer loading option is available to get up and running quickly. Then, as the tool matures and heads toward volume production, there is a clear path to fully automated wafer handling without changing the process hardware. That kind of flexibility makes it easier to iterate early and scale later without having to start over from scratch. It’s really about helping innovators move faster and with more confidence.

How do customers usually engage with your company?

Our engagements typically begin with a collaborative discovery process. We work closely with customers to understand their technical challenges, commercial objectives, and long-term vision for the project. This includes discussing key performance objectives, test methods, cost and schedule constraints, system complexity, and barriers to success. By gaining a clear understanding of both the engineering and business context, we’re able to align early on around what success looks like.

If the opportunity is a strong technical and commercial fit, we partner with customers through a phased development approach. This model offers a structured, low-risk pathway for transitioning from concept to implementation, starting with system architecture and feasibility, then progressing through detailed design, prototyping, and ultimately, scalable production. Each phase is designed to validate assumptions and refine the scope, giving customers confidence in both the technical viability and the business case.

This process enables us to build trust and deliver value at every step, whether we’re designing a new tool from scratch or helping an existing system evolve for the next stage of production.

Contact Owens Design

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