MicroUnity Systems Engineering, Inc. was a private company located in

Los Altos, California Los Altos (; Spanish for "The Heights") is a city in Santa Clara County, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The population was 31,625 according to the 2020 census. Most of the city's growth occurred between 1950 and 1980. Originally ...

and an early developer of broadband microprocessor technologies licensed widely across digital media industries.

Founders and Funding

MicroUnity was founded in 1988 by John Moussouris, a physicist trained at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University who had co-founded MIPS Computer Systems. The Chief Architect was Craig Hansen, who used to be Chief Architect at MIPS and

NeXT Next may refer to: Arts and entertainment Film * ''Next'' (1990 film), an animated short about William Shakespeare * ''Next'' (2007 film), a sci-fi film starring Nicolas Cage * '' Next: A Primer on Urban Painting'', a 2005 documentary film Lit ...

. An early investor was Moussouris’ Harvard classmate

William Randolph Hearst III William Randolph Hearst III (born June 18, 1949) is an American heir, businessman, and philanthropist. Biography Early life William Randolph Hearst III was born on June 18, 1949. His father was William Randolph Hearst Jr., and his paternal gra ...

, the publishing and media executive who became a partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins. In the early 1990s, MicroUnity was backed by over $100 million from companies like Hewlett-Packard,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent public companies, Motorol ...

, and telecommunications leaders like

Time Warner Warner Media, LLC ( traded as WarnerMedia) was an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate. It was headquartered at the 30 Hudson Yards complex in New York City, United States. It was originally established in 1972 by ...

and

John Malone John Carl Malone (born March 7, 1941) is an American billionaire businessman, landowner and philanthropist. He was chief executive officer (CEO) of Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), a cable and media giant, for twenty-four years from 1973 to 1996. ...

Tele-Communications Inc. Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) was a cable television provider in the United States, and for most of its history was controlled by Bob Magness and John Malone. The company was started in 1958 in Bozeman, Montana as Western Microwave, Inc. and Co ...

Early media processing technology

The company’s main focus was a programmable

media processor A media processor, mostly used as an image/ video processor, is a microprocessor-based system-on-a-chip which is designed to deal with digital streaming data in real-time (e.g. display refresh) rates. These devices can also be considered a class ...

chip and associated software aimed at

set-top boxes A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of sign ...

and other systems. MicroUnity kept its product development secret until 1995. In early 1996, the company published details at COMPCON of its media processor hardware and software designs. The technology processed media data of various types and width in a 128-bit data path in parallel.

Manufacturing innovations

MicroUnity developed its first designs in

BiCMOS Bipolar CMOS (BiCMOS) is a semiconductor technology that integrates two semiconductor technologies, those of the bipolar junction transistor and the CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) logic gate, into a single integrated circuit. In ...

at a time when Intel

Pentium Pro The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation x86 microprocessor developed and manufactured by Intel and introduced on November 1, 1995. It introduced the P6 microarchitecture (sometimes termed i686) and was originally intended to replace the original ...

and Sun Microsystems

SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system develope ...

were designed in BiCMOS. Company patents describe technologies intended for integration of analog media interfaces with digital circuits.

Notes

External links

*{{dead link, date=September 2019
MicroUnity's corporate website
Companies based in Santa Clara, California Companies established in 1988 Electronics companies of the United States Defunct computer companies of the United States