Beckhoff USA Promotes Josh Crayton to Semiconductor Industry Manager

With deep experience in automation and semiconductor manufacturing technologies, Crayton will lead business development and application engineering efforts for machine builders and equipment end users in the industry

Josh Crayton is taking on a new challenge at Beckhoff USA as Semiconductor Industry Manager. In this new role, Crayton will accelerate Beckhoff market share growth in the U.S. through more coordinated support and technologies tailored to this sector. He brings considerable expertise from consulting on automation technology for complex semiconductor manufacturing solutions throughout his career. Crayton reports to Director of Strategic Sales David Emory.

“Josh brings over 25 years of high-end automation and motion control experience, plus a wealth of semiconductor industry knowledge to our Strategic Sales Team,” Emory said. “He’s been an exceptional contributor at Beckhoff in his previous business development role, which included working with major semiconductor machine builders. This new position will enable him to flex his semiconductor manufacturing knowledge and provide tailored solutions at a time when this industry faces profound demands and challenges to scale rapidly across the globe.”

A native of Southern California, Crayton has held various automation sales and engineering roles since starting his career in 1997 at an automation distributor serving that region. He began focusing on the semiconductor market upon joining Motion Engineering, Inc., now part of Danaher, in 2000. There, he promoted PC-based motion control and SynqNet communication, an early competitor to EtherCAT, to customers based in Silicon Valley. In 2007, he joined Yaskawa where he held multiple strategic sales positions, working up to Western Regional Sales Manager, Motion. Since August 2019, Crayton has served as Business Development Leader for Beckhoff USA’s West Region.

Beckhoff has seen great success in the semiconductor industry based on the strength of the EtherCAT industrial Ethernet system and its acceptance as a SEMI standard in 2007. However, Crayton sees many opportunities to further optimize manufacturing with leading-edge PC-based control, servo-based motion and TwinCAT software technologies. These advances will be necessary as the semi market will exceed $1 trillion by 2030.

“The semiconductor industry has been a significant part of my career in the automation industry on the West Coast. I’ve seen its cyclical ups and downs, and I’m very excited to help this market’s top players tackle their toughest challenges,” Crayton said. “To help the industry achieve the necessary rapid growth, a greater investment in scalable automation technology is needed. In this new role, I’ll prioritize not only close collaboration with the machine builder OEMs but also truly understanding the needs of the equipment end users to ensure continued success.”

Crayton earned a Bachelor of Science in physics from Loyola Marymount University.