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| Company type | Public |
|---|---|
| TWSE:2388 | |
| Industry |
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| Founded | 1987; 39 years ago (1987) Fremont, California, United States |
| Headquarters | , |
| Products | Chipsets,motherboards,CPUs |
| Revenue | [1] |
Number of employees | 2,000[2] |
| Website | ViaTech.com |
VIA Technologies, Inc. (Chinese:威盛電子;pinyin:Wēishèng Diànzǐ) is a Taiwanese manufacturer ofintegrated circuits, mainlymotherboardchipsets,CPUs, andmemory. It was once the world's largest independent manufacturer of motherboard chipsets.[citation needed] As afabless semiconductor company, VIA conducts research and development of its chipsets in-house, then subcontracts the actual (silicon) manufacturing to third-party merchant foundries such asTSMC.
VIA is also theparent company ofVIA Labs Inc. (VLI,Chinese:威鋒電子). As an independently tradedsubsidiary,[3] VLI develops and marketsUSB 3,USB 4,USB Type-C, andUSB PD controllers for computer peripherals and mobile devices.[4]
The company was founded in 1987, inFremont, California, USA byCher Wang. In 1992, it was decided to move the headquarters toTaipei, Taiwan in order to establish closer partnerships with the substantial and growing IT manufacturing base in Taiwan and neighbouring China.[5]
In 1999, VIA acquired most ofCyrix, then a division ofNational Semiconductor. That same year, VIA acquiredCentaur Technology fromIntegrated Device Technology, marking its entry into thex86microprocessor market. VIA is the maker of theVIA C3,VIA C7 &VIA Nano processors, and theEPIA platform. The CyrixMediaGX platform remained with National Semiconductor.
In 2001, VIA established theS3 Graphics joint venture.
In January 2005, VIA began theVIA pc-1 Initiative, to develop information and communication technology systems to benefit those with no access to computers or Internet. In February 2005, VIA celebrated production of the 100 millionth VIA AMD chipset.
In July 2008, VIA Labs, Inc. (VLI) was founded as a wholly owned subsidiary of VIA Technologies Inc. (VIA) to develop and market integrated circuits primarily for USB 3.0. VLI was intended to be a "smaller and thus more agile" company that can quickly respond to the changing market.[4] It would later become an independently traded subsidiary in 2020.[6][3]
In August 2008, the company announced that it was leaving the third-party support chipset business for Intel and AMD CPUs to concentrate on its own x86 processors and integrated motherboards.[7][8] It cited the fact that the third-party chipset market had effectively disappeared and that VIA would require the capability to provide its own platform.[7]
On 29 August 2008, VIA announced that they would release official 2D accelerated Linux drivers for their chipsets, and would also release 3D accelerated drivers.[9]
In 2013, VIA entered into an agreement with theShanghai Municipal Government to create a fabless semiconductor company calledZhaoxin.[10] The joint venture is producing x86 compatible CPUs for the Chinese market.[11]
In November 2021, Intel recruited some of the employees of theCentaur Technology division from VIA, a deal worth $125 million, and effectively acquiring the talent and know-how of the x86 division.[12][13] VIA retained the x86 licence and associated patents, and its Zhaoxin CPU joint-venture continues.[14]
By the mid-1990s, VIA's business focused on integrated chipsets for the PC market. Among PC users then, VIA was best known for its motherboard (core-logic) chipsets. However, VIA's products include audio controllers, network/connectivity controllers, low-power CPUs, and even CD/DVD-writer chipsets. PC and peripheral vendors such asASUS then bought the chipsets for inclusion into their own product brands.
In the late 1990s, VIA began diversifying its core-logic business, and the company made business acquisitions forming a CPU division, graphics division, and a sound division. As advances in silicon manufacturing continue to increase the level of integration and functionality in chipsets, VIA acquired these divisions at the time to remain competitive in the core-logic market.
VIA has produced multiplex86 compatibleCPUs, through its acquisitions ofCyrix andCentaur Technology. VIA produces CPUs through theZhaoxin joint venture. Many of the CPUs areBGA chips sold pre-soldered onto a motherboard. Some of the VIA x86 processors also contain an undocumentedAlternate Instruction Set.
 | This article needs to beupdated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(May 2023) |
By 1996, VIA established itself as an important supplier of PC components with its chipsets forSocket 7 platform. With theApollo VP3 chipset in 1997 VIA pioneeredAGP support for Socket 7 processors.[15] VIA's market position between 1998 and 2000 derived from the success of itsPentium III chipsets. Around 2001Intel discontinued the development of itsSDRAM chipsets, and stated as policy that only RDRAM memory would be supported going forward. SinceRDRAM was more expensive and offered few, if any, obvious performance advantages, manufacturers found they could ship performance-equivalent PCs at a lower cost by using VIA chipsets.
In response to increasing market competition, VIA acquired the ailingS3 Graphics business in 2001. While the S3 Savage chipset was not fast enough to survive as a discrete graphics product, its low manufacturing cost made it an ideal for integration with the VIAnorthbridge. At the time under VIA, the S3 brand generally held about 10% share of the PC graphics market, behindIntel andNvidia. VIA also included theVIA Envy soundcard on its motherboards, which offered 24-bit sound. While itsPentium 4 chipset designs struggled to win market share in the face of legal threats from Intel, theK8T800 chipset for theAthlon 64 was popular.
In 2008, VIA left the support chipset business for Intel and AMD CPUs, claiming that the market for third party chipsets had all but disappeared and that they needed to concentrate on their own platform.[7][8]
From 2004 to 2012, VIA continued the development of itsVIA C3 andVIA C7 as well as other x86 and x86-64 compatible processors, targeting small, light, low power applications, a market space in which VIA continues to be successful. For example, in January 2008, VIA unveiled theVIA Nano, an 11 mm × 11 mm footprint VM-enabledx86-64 processor, which debuted in May 2008, forultra-mobile PCs. By 2013 with itsZhaoxin joint-venture, VIA continued to create x86-64 compatible CPU designs derived from their 1999 purchase of Centaur Technologies and integrated-graphics systems, owing to VIA's earlier relationship and eventual 2001 purchase of S3 Graphics.
On the basis of theIntegrated Device TechnologyCentaur Technology acquisition,[16] VIA appeared to have come into possession of at least three patents, which covered key aspects of processor technology used by Intel. On the basis of the negotiating leverage these patents offered, in 2003 VIA arrived at an agreement with Intel that allowed for a ten-year patent cross license, enabling VIA to continue to design and manufacture x86 compatible CPUs. VIA was also granted a three-yeargrace period in which it could continue to use Intel socket infrastructure.
"One of the main reasons we originally moved into the x86 processor business was because we believed that ultimately the third party chipset market would disappear, and we would need to have the capability to provide a complete platform. That has indeed come to pass [and] Intel provides the vast majority of chipsets for its processors [and] AMD is also moving very quickly in the same direction" [quote from Richard Brown of VIA]
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