A New Company, and a New Industry

Cognex Corporation was founded in 1981 by Dr. Robert J. Shillman, a lecturer in human visual perception at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Shillman decided to leave academia to start Cognex, investing his life savings of $100,000 into the company. He invited two MIT graduate students – Marilyn Matz and Bill Silver – to embark on this business venture with him, offering free bicycles to convince them to leave MIT for a summer. What began as a summer job for Marilyn and Bill turned out to be the start of a career, as they stayed on to help co-found the company. These three individuals gave Cognex its start – and its name, which was derived from the phrase "Cognition Experts".

Cognex quickly became the leading supplier of machine vision to semiconductor and electronics capital equipment makers, who integrated Cognex vision into many types of machines used to make semiconductor chips and printed circuit boards.

Throughout the 1990’s, Cognex worked with these customers to push the boundaries of machine vision-aided manufacturing. Cognex developed ever more capable vision algorithms to meet the demanding speed and performance requirements of its semiconductor and electronics customers and with Cognex’s help, vision migrated into more and more stages of the manufacturing process.

Today, machine vision is essential in virtually every step of semiconductor manufacturing, and the large majority of these applications were developed by Cognex engineers. In 2005, Cognex founders Dr. Robert J. Shillman, Bill Silver and Marilyn Matz were honored by Semiconductor Manufacturers International (SEMI) with the 2005 SEMI Award, in recognition of their important technical contributions to semiconductor manufacturing.