Wei Yen () is a Taiwanese-American technologist 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 mone ...

. Yen and his brother David Yen along with King-sun Fu 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 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 from 1988 to 1996, where he led development on OpenGL 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 proc ...

. 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, 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 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 featu ...

graphics chip family. Yen later joined ATI's board of directors. With Nintendo, Yen cofounded another company iQue, the manufacturing and distributing arm of Nintendo for mainland China. Yen founded iGware, a company that offers cloud computing services to its customers, including Nintendo. iGware's cloud services power the online services of the Nintendo DS, Wii, Nintendo 3DS, and Wii U. 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 wi ...

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, ATI,

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