Wei Yen () is a Taiwanese-American

technologist Technologist may refer to: * Applied Science Technologist, a Canadian professional title in engineering and applied science technology. * Architectural technologist, a specialist in the technology fields of building, design and construction. * C ...

and

serial entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...

. He has been involved with several companies, including most recently as Chairman and Founder of

AiLive AiLive Inc. (formerly iKuni) is a software company based in Mountain View, California, Mountain View, California. The company was co-founded in 2000 by software programmer and developer Wei Yen and by computer engineer Xiaoyuan Tu. The company has ...

. Yen received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in Operating Systems and Artificial Intelligence from

Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and money ...

. Yen and his brother David Yen along with

King-sun Fu King-Sun Fu (; October 2, 1930 – April 29, 1985) was a Chinese-born American computer scientist. He was a Goss Distinguished Professor at Purdue University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in West Lafayette, Indiana. He was instru ...

published the pape
"Data Coherence Problem in a Multicache System"
that describes a practical cache coherence protocol.

Career

Yen served as the Director of Software Engineering for Cydrome Inc, where he worked with his brother David, who served as the Director of Hardware Engineering. They were the major contributors to the

Cydra-5 The Cydra-5 departmental supercomputer is the first minisupercomputer designed by Cydrome. It was completed in 1987. At that time Cydra-5 cost from $0.5 million to $1 million, but achieved one-half the performance of contemporary supercomputers whi ...

mini-supercomputer. The system was a combination of a VLIW ECL-based processor used for scientific applications and a multi-processor system designed for a bus architecture based on thei
Cache Coherence protocol
Yen served as Senior Vice President of

SGI SGI may refer to: Companies *Saskatchewan Government Insurance *Scientific Games International, a gambling company *Silicon Graphics, Inc., a former manufacturer of high-performance computing products *Silicon Graphics International, formerly Rac ...

from 1988 to 1996, where he led development on

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...

and also served as President of subsidiary

MIPS Technologies MIPS Technologies, Inc., formerly MIPS Computer Systems, Inc., was an American fabless semiconductor design company that is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of RISC CPU chips based on it. MIPS provides proce ...

. In 1996, he left SGI and founded TVsoft, a maker of interactive software for television setup devices. The company was renamed Navio and later merged with Oracle's Network Computer (NC). Subsequently, the company went public as Liberate Technologies in July 1999. Its public offering reached a $12 billion valuation in early 2000 with a revenue run rate of $25 million. In parallel, Yen founded a company called

ArtX ArtX was a company formed in 1997 by a group of twenty former Silicon Graphics, Inc. engineers, who had worked on the Nintendo 64's graphics chip. The company was focused on delivering a PC graphics chip that was both high performance and cost eff ...

, employed with former SGI graphics engineers. ArtX received the contract to deliver the

Nintendo GameCube The is a home video game console developed and released by Nintendo in Japan on September 14, 2001, in North America on November 18, 2001, and in PAL territories in 2002. It is the successor to the Nintendo 64 (1996), and predecessor of the Wii ...

's Flipper graphics chip. The company was acquired by

ATI Ati or ATI may refer to: * Ati people, a Negrito ethnic group in the Philippines **Ati language (Philippines), the language spoken by this people group ** Ati-Atihan festival, an annual celebration held in the Philippines *Ati language (China), a ...

in February 2000 for $400 million. This led to ATI's greatly improved

R300 The R300 GPU, introduced in August 2002 and developed by ATI Technologies, is its third generation of GPU used in '' Radeon'' graphics cards. This GPU features 3D acceleration based upon Direct3D 9.0 and OpenGL 2.0, a major improvement in featur ...

graphics chip family. Yen later joined ATI's board of directors. With

Nintendo is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational video game company headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. It develops video games and video game consoles. Nintendo was founded in 1889 as by craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi and originally produce ...

, Yen cofounded another company

iQue iQue, Ltd. () is a Chinese video game/game localization and support development company located in Suzhou. It was founded as a joint venture between Wei Yen and Nintendo in 2002 as a Chinese video game console manufacturing company. The followi ...

, the manufacturing and distributing arm of

for mainland China. Yen founded iGware, a company that offers cloud computing services to its customers, including

. iGware's cloud services power the online services of the

Nintendo DS The is a handheld game console produced by Nintendo, released globally across 2004 and 2005. The DS, an initialism for "Developers' System" or "Dual Screen", introduced distinctive new features to handheld games: two LCD screens working in tan ...

Wii The Wii ( ) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released on November 19, 2006, in North America and in December 2006 for most other Regional lockout, regions of the world. It is Nintendo's fifth major ho ...

Nintendo 3DS The is a handheld game console produced by Nintendo. It was announced in March 2010 and unveiled at E3 2010 as the successor to the Nintendo DS. The system features backward compatibility with Nintendo DS video games. As an eighth-generatio ...

, and

Wii U The Wii U ( ) is a home video game console developed by Nintendo as the successor to the Wii. Released in late 2012, it is the first eighth-generation video game console and competed with Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PlayStation 4. The W ...

. In July 2011, Acer, of which Yen is a former board member, acquired the US-based iGware for $320 million, and thus iGware becomes a part of Acer's company structure in providing cloud services. iGware changed its name to Acer Cloud Technology Co. and continued to be headed by Yen. As a result of the acquisition, Yen is the second largest shareholder of Acer after founder

Stan Shih Stan Shih (; born 18 December 1944), is the Co-founder & Honorary Chairman of Acer Inc. In 1976, after receiving bachelor's and master's degrees in electronic engineering from National Chiao Tung University, Shih founded Multitech with his wif ...

. Yen is currently the chairman and founder of

, the company that partnered with Nintendo in developing software tools for programmers working with the

Wii Remote The Wii Remote, also known colloquially as the Wiimote, is the primary game controller for Nintendo's Wii home video game console. An essential capability of the Wii Remote is its motion sensing capability, which allows the user to interact with ...

controller and

Wii MotionPlus The is an expansion device for the Wii Remote, the primary game controller for the Wii. The device allows more complex motion to be interpreted than the Wii Remote can do alone. Both the Wii and its successor, the Wii U, support the Wii MotionP ...

attachment. Yen has been on the board of several prominent companies including Acer,

MoSys MoSys, Inc., originally Monolithic System Technology (MoST), was a fabless semiconductor design company founded in 1991. The company primarily designed memory chips and were especially known for their Multibank DRAM and 1T-SRAM technologies— ...

, and others.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wei, Yen People in information technology Living people Nintendo people Silicon Graphics people Computer programmers IQue Purdue University College of Engineering alumni 1952 births

Career

See also

References