VIA Technologies is a Taiwanese developer of integrated circuits, motherboard chipsets, GPUs, x86 CPUs, and memory, and is part of the Formosa Plastics Group. It is the largest independent manufacturer of motherboard chipsets. As a Fabless semiconductor manufacturer, VIA conducts research and development of its chipsets in-house, and then outsources manufacturing to third parties (such as TSMC). VIA’s name is an acronym for “Very Innovative Architecture”.
Summary
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- 1 History
- 2 Products
- 3 See also
- 4 Sources
History
The company was founded in 1987 in Silicon Valley (Fremont, California) by Wen Chi Chen, among others. He was employed by Intel before joining Symphony Laboratories, and as CEO of Symphony decides to transform it into VIA. Chen transfers Symphony employees to Taiwan to start chip manufacturing. In 1992 the headquarters were also moved to Taipei, Taiwan.
In 1996 he played an important role in the PC Common Architecture standard group, driving the change from the ISA bus to the PCI bus.
In 1999 it acquired most of Cyrix (then a division of National Semiconductor) and Centaur Technology (initially owned by IDT), bringing it into the x86 microprocessor market. VIA is the creator of the VIA C3 (released in 2001) and VIA C7 (released in 2005) processors and the EPIA platform. The Cyrix MediaGX platform remains in the possession of National Semiconductor. These processors have been marketed primarily for the mini-notebook and UMPC segment such as the VIA NanoBook prototype and mini-notebooks based on it such as the Cloudbook.
In 2001 he created a joint venture with SonicBlue (Diamond Multimedia) for the GPUs company S3 Graphics. Following the bankruptcy of SonicBlue, S3 becomes a subsidiary of VIA
In October 2001, VIA announced the creation of the VIA Platform Solutions Division (VPSD), which would be responsible for the design of a new range of motherboards and platforms under the VIA label. In 2004, the division changed its name to VIA Embedded Platform Division ( VEPD), as a result of the focus on the EPIA platform and low-power CPUs market.
In 2002, VIA launched the Canaan Project, as a result of which two new divisions were created in 2003: VIA Optical Solution, Inc. (optical storage controllers) and VIA Networking Technologies, Inc. (networks and communications). It also acquires the CDMA2000 design team from LSI Logic to form the subsidiary VIA Telecom Inc. (based in San Diego, California) and focused on the CDMA2000 standard.
In February 2005, VIA celebrated the manufacturing of its 100 Millionth VIA AMD chipset.
products
VIA’s chipsets are its main product and the best known (in competition with ATI, AMD, Intel or NVIDIA), mainly occupying the low market with a wide variety of solutions. VIA does not manufacture (except for the EPIA platform) motherboards by itself, preferring to leave that business in the hands of its main customers. However, VIA’s products include audio, networking and connectivity controllers, low-power CPUs, and even chipsets for CD / DVD rewriters. Manufacturers of motherboards, peripherals and PCs such as ASUS purchase VIA’s chips and solutions for inclusion in their products.
In the late 1990s, VIA began to diversify its business, making several purchases of companies that eventually crystallized into the CPU, GPU, and sound chip divisions. With advancements in silicon chip technology, VIA needs these divisions to increase the level of integration of its products and remain competitive in the chipset market. Market evolution
As an established supplier of PC components, in particular for the Super Socket 7 platform, VIA’s current market position stems from the success of its Pentium III chipsets. Intel made the mistake of suspending development of SDRAM chipsets, stating that from now on it would only support RAMBUS memory. RAMBUS being significantly more expensive at the time and offering little or no performance advantage, manufacturers found that the only supplier of SDRAM chipsets with similar performance to Intel and a lower price was VIA.
While VIA chipsets have historically had compatibility and performance issues, especially in the AGP implementation, an internal program to improve production standards began to bear fruit. VIA offered high-performance, stable and mature chipsets, which became a great attraction for the market, boosting profits. Many companies that previously had a policy of buying only Intel products for the first time placed high-volume orders from VIA, and were satisfied with the result. Intel eventually returned to the development of SDRAM chipsets, producing the Intel 815 chipset, with support for 133 MHz SDRAM memory and a 133 MHz Front Side Bus. As NVIDIA comes out with the powerful nForce2 chipset for Athlon, the VIA market began to decline. .
In response to a more competitive market, VIA decided to buy the comatose S3 Graphics business. Although the Savage chipset was not fast enough to compete as a discrete solution, its low manufacturing costs made it ideal for the embedded solutions market, as part of VIA’s northbridge. With VIA, the S3 brand has achieved a 10% PC graphics market share, behind Intel, ATI, and NVIDIA. VIA also includes the VIA Envy sound chip for integration into the motherboard and sound card, with quality 24-bit sound.
Although VIA chipsets designed for Pentium 4 have struggled to gain market share in the face of legal threats from Intel, the VIA K8T800 chipset for the Athlon 64 has been popular.
VIA has also continued to develop its VIA C3 and VIA C7 processors, with the low-power market in mind, in which VIA has been successful. In January 2008, the 11 x 11mm VIA Isaiah announced an x86-64 CPU with Virtualization support expected to appear in the first quarter of 2008 for the Ultra Mobile PC market.
In August 2008 in an interview on the British website CustomPC, [1] Richard Brown, one of VIA’s vice-presidents stated that the company would withdraw from the chipset business for third-party CPUs (Intel, AMD) to focus on its own CPUs. and chipsets for motherboards for such CPUs. Legal issues
Based on the purchase of IDT Centaur, [2] VIA appears to have acquired at least three patents, covering key aspects of the processor technology used by Intel. Based on these patents, VIA entered into a patent crossover agreement with Intel in 2003 for a period of 10 years, allowing VIA to continue in the market for the design and manufacture of x86 compatible CPUs. VIA also got a three-year grace period during which it can continue to use Intel’s socket infrastructure.
