LSI Logic

Founded in Milpitas in 1981 by Wilfred Corrigan, the former CEO of Fairchild. The pitch was ASICs: the customer designed the logic, LSI turned it into a chip. One of its engineers was Jensen Huang, who left in 1993 to co-found Nvidia.

Buying Symbios Logic in 1998 pulled the company into storage, and LSI became shorthand for RAID and SAS controllers — MegaRAID cards shipped in servers from practically every vendor, usually wearing someone else's label. After merging with Agere in 2007 it became LSI Corporation. Avago bought it in 2014 for $6.6 billion, then bought Broadcom and took its name. The controllers are still around; the logo isn't.