Farewell to Giuseppe Crippa, the pensioner who innovated microelectronics
Giuseppe Crippa turned his passion for microelectronics into a successful company, Technoprobe, listed on the stock exchange in 2022. With a unique entrepreneurial story, Crippa has proved that innovation has no age
2' min read
2' min read
Giuseppe Crippa, one of the fathers of microelectronics and founder of Technoprobe, one of Italy's most innovative industrial groups in the microprocessor manufacturing sector, has passed away at the age of 90. That of the entrepreneur born in Robbiate, in the province of Lecco, considered among the richest men in Italy, is a story of innovation that begins after retirement, a Silicon Valley story but in the Benjamin Button style. Unlike Steve Jobs and other founders of Big Tech USA who started in their garage at a young age, Crippa built a multimillion-dollar company in 1995 after leaving STMicroelectronics in a garage, together with his son Cristiano and his wife Mariarosa Lavelli, who was in charge of administration.
His career began after a brief stint at Breda, in the early 1960s, when he joined Sgs-Ates, later to become STMicroelectronics, where he began working on semiconductors, even going to study in Silicon Valley. In 1995, he accepted severance pay and reinvested in Technoprobe, which today is a leader in the semiconductor and microelectronics sector and of which he was CEO until 2017.
In 1996, he came up with the idea of making probe cards for testing microchips. These devices are a key component in the semiconductor production process: they are mainly used to check the correct functioning of individual chips before they are manufactured and sold. Until then, these interfaces were produced almost exclusively in the United States, through long and complex processes, because they were custom-made.
Crippa succeeded in developing a method that allows probe cards to be produced very quickly and without large facilities, thus speeding up the chip prototyping process for the consumer electronics market, which increasingly requires microprocessors for different types of devices.
After its birth in the garage at home, Technoprobe debuted on the stock exchange at Euronext Growth in 2022, registering a +1% on debut, with a valuation of EUR 3.5 billion. Today, the company has a turnover (financial year 2024) of EUR 543 million, 3,355 employees and an international presence through 21 locations.
