VIA Technologies (TWSE: 2388) is a Taiwanese manufacturer of integrated circuits, mainly motherboard chipsets, CPUs, and memory, and is part of the Formosa Plastics Group. It is the world's largest independent manufacturer of motherboard chipsets. As a fabless semiconductor company, VIA conducts research and development of its chipsets in-house, then subcontracts the actual (silicon) manufacturing to third-party merchant foundries (such as TSMC.)
In 1987, the firm was founded from the Symphony Company in Silicon Valley by Wen Chi Chen (陳文琦), among others. He was employed at Intel before joining Symphony, and is still CEO of Symphony. Chen transferred the employees of Symphony to Taiwan, to start chip production. VIA stands for "Very Innovative Architecture".
In 1992, the headquarters were moved to Taipei, Taiwan.
In 1996, VIA took a major part in the PC Common Architecture standard group, pushing the move from the ISA bus to the PCI bus.
In 1999, VIA acquired most of Cyrix, then a division of National Semiconductor, and also Integrated Device Technology's Centaur, marking its entry into the x86 microprocessor market. VIA is the maker of the VIA C3 and VIA C7 processors, and the EPIA platform. The Cyrix MediaGX platform remained with National Semiconductor.
In 2001, VIA established the S3 Graphics joint venture.
In January 2005, VIA began the VIA 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 29 August 2008, VIA announced that they were releasing official 2D accelerated Linux drivers for their chipsets, and would also release 3D accelerated drivers.
