VIA Technologies
VIA Technologies 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.
The company was founded in 1987 from the Symphony Company in Silicon Valley by, among others, Wen Chi Chen (陈文琦) (who was employed at Intel before joining Symphony), who is still CEO of the company. Chen transferred the employees of Symphony to Taiwan to start chip production.
In 1996 VIA played a major part in the PC Common Architecture standard group, pushing the switch from the ISA bus to the PCI bus.
In 1999 it acquired most of Cyrix, then a division of National Semiconductor and also Centaur, marking its entry into the microprocessor market. VIA is the maker of the VIA C3 and VIA C4 processors.