Chips and Technologies
More info
- Creator
- Gordon Campbell, Dado Banatao
- Released
- 1984
- Type
- Semiconductor company
- Owner
- Intel (from 1998)
The California firm that invented the modern chipset and made PC clones cheap to build.
An IBM PC/AT motherboard carried around sixty separate logic chips. Chips and Technologies, founded in 1984 by Gordon Campbell and Dado Banatao, squeezed them down to a handful. Its best-known product, the NEAT chipset of 1986, meant any board maker in Taiwan could turn out an AT clone without understanding the whole design.
The company later did well with graphics chips for laptops. Intel bought it in 1998, by which point Intel had taken the chipset market for itself. Every modern computer with a chipset carries the idea forward, even if hardly anyone remembers the name.