Semiconductor History | 844 North King Street, Wilmington — Where the PC Chipset Business Was Decided

The package in the photograph is moulded with three words: VIA, VT82C686A, and TAIWAN. It is a southbridge, the chip that used to sit on a motherboard and connect everything that was not the processor. Around 2000, chips like this one held about half the world market, and 威盛電子 (VIA Technologies) was the largest independent chipset designer in the world. Its shares reached NT$629 that year, the highest price on the Taiwan exchange. 陳文琦 founded the company in Silicon Valley in 1987, with 王雪紅 as chair; the Taiwanese company was incorporated on 21 September 1992 and has been in 新店 ever since. VIA never made processors at first. It made the chips around other companies' processors, which is a good business and a precarious one, because it depends on a licence to the processor's bus. VIA believed it had that coverage, inherited through the companies it bought: Cyrix from National Semiconductor and Centaur from Integrated Device Technology in 1999, and S3's graphics division after that. Intel disagreed. In September 2001 Intel filed suit in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware, which sits in this building, alleging that VIA's P4X266 and P4M266 chipsets infringed five of its patents covering chipsets for the Pentium 4. VIA countersued on patents it had acquired with Centaur, and the fight spread until it covered eleven cases in five countries and twenty-seven patents. The damage was not done by any verdict. Motherboard manufacturers, who buy chipsets by the million and cannot afford an injunction, began avoiding VIA's parts while the cases ran. After the settlement VIA's own marketing director said plainly that the litigation had been the main thing keeping first-tier motherboard makers away. Both companies announced the settlement on 7 April 2003. All claims were dismissed everywhere, and the two signed a ten-year patent cross-licence. Intel granted VIA a four-year licence to design and sell chipsets compatible with its processor bus, and agreed not to assert its patents on those chipsets for a fifth year. VIA also received a licence for processors compatible with the x86 instruction set but not with Intel's bus or pin layout, and three years of non-assertion on the ones that were. By then the market had moved on without it, and something structural was coming that no licence could fix. Intel began moving the memory controller into the processor package itself, which removed the northbridge from the motherboard, and with it the business of selling one. VIA left the chipset business in 2007. The building at 844 North King Street still houses the District of Delaware, one of the busiest patent courts in the United States. The photograph is of the chip, not of the courthouse. The pin is here because this is where the chipset business was actually decided. Photo: MOS6502, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (a VIA VT82C686A southbridge on a motherboard).