OPTi Inc.

OPTi Inc. was a fabless semiconductor company based in Milpitas, California, that primarily manufactured chipsets for personal computers. The company dissolved in 2001 and transferred its assets to the unaffiliated non-practicing entity OPTi Technologies (itself later renamed OPTi Inc.)

History

OPTi Inc. was formed in 1989 in Milpitas, California, by former employees of Chips and Technologies. Cash-strapped on a "shoe-string udget, among the company's first products was a trio of VLSI chipsets for i386SX-equipped AT motherboards. The first was a direct-mapped CPU cache for 386SX motherboards; the second was a burst-mode CPU cache for 486 motherboards; and the third was a interleaved memory module for 486 motherboards. OPTi measured the latter two chipsets to reduce the component count on 486 motherboards clocked at 40 MHz (or 11  MIPS) to as few as 20. In 1991, Chips and Technologies filed a patent infringement suit against OPTi, alleging unauthorized use of two of C&T's patents regarding semiconductor memory designs and particularly interleaved memory schemes, but a federal judge later ruled in OPTi's favor.

In early 1992, the company developed one of the first local bus designs for IBM PC compatibles. It soon found itself competing with VESA's implementation and the nascent PCI bus standard by Intel. It survived into the Pentium era before OPTi submitted to Intel and began manufacturing PCI chipsets. Later in 1992, they introduced a programmable writethrough–writeback cache chipset for the contemporary wave of upgradable motherboards, supporting up to 64 MB of RAM and processors by Intel, Cyrix, and AMD.

OPTi had a peak workforce of 235 employees and US$164 million in annual sales in the early 1990s; only three years after its inception, OPTi's revenue for fiscal year 1991 reached $100 million, under CEO Kenny Liu (b. 1954). Although considered a small company, OPTi's initial public offering in 1993 proved successful in the short term. However, the ramping-up of Intel's chipset manufacturing in 1994 challenged OPTi's presence in their market. While Intel saw OPTi as its nearest competitor then, Intel accounted for 66 percent of all sales of Pentium-class chipsets, with OPTi at 10 percent and Taiwan-based SIS at 7 percent. Liu stepped down from his role as CEO in 1994, remaining chairman of the board.


OPTi was reasonably more successful in the mobile chipset arena, starting with i486-based chipsets for notebooks and other portable computers in 1994, earning design wins from Toshiba, NEC, and Hewlett-Packard with their PCI-based Viper-N chipset from December 1994 to mid-1995. OPTi's Viper-M chipset, their challenger to Intel's Triton chipset on the desktop, was notable for supporting Cyrix's then-unreleased 6x86 processor, as well as AMD's K5—both competitors to Intel's Pentium, which Viper-M also supported. Contemporary chipsets from Intel only had support for the Pentium. In September 1995, OPTi joined an alliance with semiconductor fabricator United Microelectronics Corporation and several other fabless companies including SIS to raise a 350– 250 nm semiconductor plant within Hsinchu, Taiwan, in late 1995 or early 1996.

OPTi dabbled with 2D graphics processing unit design with the TrueColor GUI Accelerator in August 1995. Two years prior, the company had acquired MediaChips Inc., a designer of low-cost digital sound chips, whose patents for a single-chip sound controller they used to design the OPTi 929 in 1994. In 1997, OPTi and Singapore-based TriTech Microelectronics were sued by Crystal Semiconductor, a subsidiary of Cirrus Logic, for alleged patent infringement of Crystal's mixed-signal

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