Our History
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1976
The Winning Idea
The vision of the young founder, Luciano Bonaria (formerly a test engineer at General Electric), was to create standard machinery for electronics testing and offer them to manufacturers of electronic boards and devices.
It was a winning idea, the first step in a history of excellence, marked by success and characterized by uninterrupted growth.
1980
International Expansion
The success of SPEA’s early products led the company to grow and expand abroad, starting with Germany, the economic engine of Europe.
Several milestones in the SPEA portfolio were established during these years: the Digitest, the first Digital ICT Automatic Board Tester, and the Unitest 500, the first model with a multifunctional architecture, which laid the foundation for all future projects.
The ’90s
New Development Scenarios
SPEA had become an established reality in the world of testing, ranking as the fourth largest company globally in the field of electronic board testing. Research and Development was working at full capacity, giving rise to products destined to become the state-of-the-art in electronic testing, such as the 4040, SPEA’s first flying probe tester.
The Turin-based company’s innovative equipment was employed for the first time in semiconductor testing, opening up significant new development scenarios.
2000-2009
Continuous Growth
The new millennium brought a wealth of changes to the electronics world, and SPEA was ready. The continuous search for increasingly innovative testing solutions led the company to grow incessantly, brilliantly overcoming phases of global crisis and acquiring prestigious customers among electronics manufacturers worldwide.
Some of SPEA’s current flagship products were developed during these years, such as the first MEMS accelerometer test cell and the new 3030 multifunction in-circuit testing platform.
2010-2019
Testing Leader
SPEA is now among the undisputed global leaders in testing, both in the semiconductor and electronic board sectors. Investments made in previous years led SPEA to dominate the brand-new market of test equipment for inertial microsensors.
The family of MEMS testers expanded with new input/output units and stimuli for a variety of devices (humidity, pressure, UV, proximity, magnetic sensors, and microphones). Furthermore, SPEA launched the 4080, an 8-axis flying probe tester designed to combine the highest test speed with the most accurate contacting precision.
Today
New Technologies
A world that is increasingly digitalized, automated, and interconnected: this is the scenario guiding the world of electronics in the new decade, framing SPEA’s growth projects as well. The company is at the forefront of developing testing technologies aimed at ensuring the correct functioning of all electronic components at the heart of autonomous vehicles, sensors that power Smart Objects and the Internet of Things, and electronics that make the world greener, linked to renewable energy sources and efficient energy use (power electronics, batteries, power management).
SPEA also confirms its activity in the field of industrial automation, extending automatic handling functionalities—already present on testers and handlers for integrated circuits—to testers for electronic boards and modules. Thus, SPEA testers are now capable of operating in total autonomy, even in fully automated factories. Finally, the high integration of functions on modules that traditionally housed only electronic components (functions such as touch displays, buttons, LEDs, speakers, etc.) has led to the birth of a new family of optomechatronics testers to perform all electronic, optical, and mechanical tests on a single system.
