 | |
| Company type | Public |
|---|---|
| Industry | Fabless semiconductor |
| Founded | 1989; 36 years ago (1989) inMilpitas, California, United States |
| Defunct | September 2001; 23 years ago (2001-09) |
| Fate | Dissolved |
| Successor | OPTi Technologies (2002–2020) |
Key people |
|
| Products | Chipsets |
Number of employees | 235 (early 1990s, peak) |
OPTi Inc. was afabless semiconductor company based inMilpitas, California, that primarily manufacturedchipsets forpersonal computers. The company dissolved in 2001 and transferred its assets to the unaffiliatednon-practicing entityOPTi Technologies (itself later renamed OPTi Inc.)
OPTi Inc. was formed in 1989 inMilpitas, California,[1] by former employees ofChips and Technologies. Cash-strapped on a "shoe-string [budget]" on its foundation,[2] among the company's first products was a trio ofVLSI chipsets fori386SX- andi486-equippedAT motherboards. The first was adirect-mappedCPU cache for 386SX motherboards; the second was aburst-mode CPU cache for 486 motherboards;[3] and the third was ainterleaved 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.[4] In 1991, Chips and Technologies filed apatent infringement suit against OPTi, alleging unauthorized use of two of C&T's patents regardingsemiconductor memory designs and particularly interleaved memory schemes, but a federal judge later ruled in OPTi's favor.[5][6]
In early 1992,[7] the company developed one of the firstlocal bus designs forIBM PC compatibles. It soon found itself competing withVESA'simplementation and the nascentPCI bus standard byIntel.[8] It survived into thePentium era before OPTi submitted to Intel and began manufacturing PCI chipsets.[9][10] Later in 1992, they introduced aprogrammablewritethrough–writeback cache chipset for the contemporary wave of upgradable motherboards, supporting up to 64 MB of RAM and processors by Intel,Cyrix, andAMD.[11]
OPTi had a peak workforce of 235 employees and US$164 million in annual sales in the early 1990s;[12] only three years after its inception, OPTi's revenue for fiscal year 1991 reached $100 million, under CEO Kenny Liu (b. 1954).[2][13] Although considered a small company,[14] OPTi'sinitial public offering in 1993 proved successful in the short term.[12] However, the ramping-up ofIntel'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-basedSIS at 7 percent.[15] Liu stepped down from his role as CEO in 1994, remaining chairman of the board.[13]
OPTi was reasonably more successful in the mobile chipset arena,[16][17] starting with i486-based chipsets fornotebooks and otherportable computers in 1994,[18] earning design wins fromToshiba,NEC, andHewlett-Packard with their PCI-based Viper-N chipset from December 1994 to mid-1995.[19][20] OPTi's Viper-M chipset, their challenger to Intel'sTriton chipset on the desktop, was notable for supporting Cyrix's then-unreleased6x86 processor, as well as AMD'sK5—both competitors to Intel's Pentium, which Viper-M also supported.[21] Contemporary chipsets from Intel only had support for the Pentium.[22] In September 1995, OPTi joined an alliance with semiconductor fabricatorUnited Microelectronics Corporation and several other fabless companies including SIS to raise a350–250 nm semiconductor plant withinHsinchu, Taiwan, in late 1995 or early 1996.[23]
OPTi dabbled with 2Dgraphics processing unit design with the TrueColorGUI Accelerator in August 1995.[24] Two years prior, the company had acquiredMediaChips Inc., a designer of low-cost digitalsound chips,[25] whose patents for a single-chip sound controller they used to design the OPTi 929 in 1994.[26][27] In 1997,[28] OPTi and Singapore-based TriTech Microelectronics were sued byCrystal Semiconductor, a subsidiary ofCirrus Logic, for alleged patent infringement of Crystal'smixed-signal technology used in the audio component of the Viper-M chipset,[29] which OPTi designed around being compatible with Intel'sNative Signal Processing technology.[30] The courts ruled in favor of Crystal in late 1999 or early 2000, ordering TriTech and OPTi to pay their portion of a combined $20 million.[28]
OPTi found itself unable to compete against Intel's newfound dominance in the chipset market, with sales all but disappearing by late 1998. The company, which had moved toPalo Alto, California, appointed Bernie Marren as CEO that year.[12] Marren, who had been a board director since 1996,[2] steered the company away from the chipset business in 1999, in favor of developingmicrocontrollers for notebooks,[31] chieflyLCDs andUSB andIEEE 1394 (FireWire) serial buses.[1] These products however barely broke even,[12] and in September 2001, OPTi's board of directors voted unanimously to dissolve the company, subject to approval in November 2001.[1] After a year of dormancy, the company sold its semiconductor business and assets to the unaffiliated company OPTi Technologies.[32] Marren soon took the reins of OPTi Technologies, and the company shortly after renamed themselves OPTi Inc.[12]
This incarnation of OPTi Inc. became known as anon-practicing entity—acting only as licensor for their patents and litigating against other semiconductor businesses for alleged infringement of their patents—under Marren's management.[31] Their litigation began shortly before the establishment of OPTi Technologies, with Intel in 2001. Intel settled out of court with OPTi that year for $13.5 million in exchange for the purchase of patents OPTi alleged that Intel had infringed. OPTi then launched a string of successful suits againstAmtel,Broadcom,Renesas,Silicon Storage Technology,STMicroelectronics,Standard Microsystems Corporation, andVIA Technologies.[12]CNET characterized this as a "patent infringement litigation rampage".[2]
In early 2006,[33] OPTi filed the first of numerous patent infringement suits againstNvidia; by 2009 the company had won a total of $14.75 million in judgments and settlements against Nvidia, with further litigation by that point still in limbo.[12] Also in 2006, OPTi launched an infringement suit against AMD,[33] though this case stalled until February 2010.[12] The courts ruled in favor of OPTi in May 2010, and AMD agreed to pay $32 or $35 million to OPTi.[34]
In January 2007, OPTi launched a suit in theU.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas againstApple Inc. for the unauthorized use of OPTi's "predictivesnooping of cache memory for master-initiated accesses" patent in Apple'sMacintosh computers.[35] The courts in Texas ruled in favor of OPTi and ordered Apple to pay $21.7 million—$19 million in instances of patent misuse and $2.7 million in prejudgement interest (potential lost profits for OPTi due to their focus on the lawsuit).[36] Apple announced their intention toappeal in December 2009 but dropped this appeal a year later—on the day before a court was to hear it.[37]
OPTi (Technologies) Inc. in 2010 only staffed three people, including Marren.[34] The company again suedVIA Technologies in 2013 and won on judgement $2.1 million plus $1 million as prejudgement interest, but lost this on VIA's appeal. For the fiscal years ending in 2014 and 2015, the company reported no revenue from licensing and claimed operating losses. In 2018, the company was down to its last employee.[31] OPTi finally shuttered in September 2020.[38]
