Ricoh
More info
- Creator
- Kiyoshi Ichimura
- Released
- 1936
- Type
- Electronics and imaging
Japanese imaging giant whose semiconductor arm happened to build the brains of an entire console generation.
Founded in Tokyo in 1936 by Kiyoshi Ichimura, the company grew big on cameras, copiers and office printers. Less widely known is that its chip division took a contract from Nintendo in the 1980s to manufacture the Ricoh 2A03 CPU and the 2C02 picture chip for the Famicom and NES. Ricoh later made the main processor for the SNES as well.
Ricoh bought Pentax's camera business in 2011 and survives as a global document-handling group. But for most people who grew up with a NES, Ricoh was already in the living room — nobody just knew it.