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Description: Weitek Corporation was a chip design and manufacturing company that was founded through the initiatives of its Chairman, A.J. COLLMEYER and R.H. BOHNET (President & Chief Executive Officer). The company is not responsible for the selling of add-in cards to end users nor is it set up to provide customer support for them. The company instead concentrates in directly dealing with vendors, as well as board manufacturers, for the inclusion of their chip designs into their clients’ hardware products. This includes the conception of the required software driver support.

The company’s operation began in the early 1980’s where it concentrated in the use of FPU (Floating Point Units) for numerous commercial CPU architectures. By early 1990’s majority of the CPU designs in the market adhered to the use of built-in FPUs in their systems. The company made numerous tries to break into the graphics driver and CPU market. Near the end of 1996, majority of the company was acquired by Rockwell's Semiconductor Systems.

One of the more notable contributions of the company was the Weitek 3172 deployed for the Sun Microsystems SPARCstationWeitek in 1981. Other processors developed by the company were based on Motorola’s 68000 family, i286 systems of Intel, and the 1064 and 1067 processors. Weitek delivered to Intel the 1167 when the i386 FPU design of Intel fell way behind in the development process. During the later years, the company delivered similar FPUs that were used in MIPS architecture referred to as the XL product line. Although the FPUs of Weitek were considered odd as they only support for single precision math, this resulted in extremely fast execution speeds.

Another project of Weitecs is its collaboration with HP. As such, the company pursued work on the PA-RISC design and distributed their very own version called RISC 8200 which was used generally in laser printers.

With the completion of their SPARC POWER µP work for Sun Microsystems workstations, Weitek took the frame buffer technology to increase existing workstation speeds by up to 50%. The company took this experience and focused on the PC market during the early 1990’s to present a new line of SVGA multimedia chipsets which it called POWER systems. This technology was implemented in numerous third party developments that were based on VESA Local Bus standards. The shift to PCI further increased the popularity of the POWER systems sometime in 1994, and was incorporated in the Viper design.

The success of the company on the 486 computer processor market, however, became difficult to duplicate towards the end of the 1990’s when new market players introduced relatively lower cost systems with the same functionality. The company then developed and marketed the W464 (486) and the W564 (P5) which were utilized for machine RAM frame buffers to lower production cost.

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