VIA Technologies (TSE: 2388) is a Taiwanese manufacturer of integrated circuits, mainly motherboard chipsets, CPUs, and memory, and is part of the Formosa Plastics Group. It is the world's largest independent manufacturer of motherboard chipsets. As a fabless semiconductor company, VIA conducts research and development of its chipsets in-house, then subcontracts the actual (silicon) manufacturing to third-party merchant foundries (such as TSMC.)
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VIA Technologies (TSE: 2388) is a Taiwanese manufacturer of integrated circuits, mainly motherboard chipsets, CPUs, and memory, and is part of the Formosa Plastics Group. It is the world's largest independent manufacturer of motherboard chipsets. As a fabless semiconductor company, VIA conducts research and development of its chipsets in-house, then subcontracts the actual (silicon) manufacturing to third-party merchant foundries (such as TSMC.)
The company was founded in 1987 from the Symphony Company in Silicon Valley by Wen Chi Chen (陳文琦), among others. He was employed at Intel before joining Symphony, and is still CEO of Symphony. Chen transferred the employees of Symphony to Taiwan to start chip production. VIA stands for "Very Innovative Architecture".
In 1992 headquarters was moved to Taipei, Taiwan.
In 1996 VIA played a major part in the PC Common Architecture standard group, pushing the switch from the ISA bus to the PCI bus.
In 1999 it acquired most of Cyrix (then a division...
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