Chips and Technologies, founded in Milpitas, California in December 1984 by Gordon A. Campbell and Dado Banatao, and was an early fabless semiconductor company. Its first product, announced September 1985, was a four chip EGAchipset that handled the functions of 19 of IBM's proprietary chips on the Enhanced Graphics Adapter. By that November's COMDEX, more than a half dozen companies had introduced EGA-compatible boards based on C&T's chipset. This was followed by chipsets for PC motherboards and other computer graphics chips. C&T was acquired by Intel in 1997, primarily for its graphics chip business. Former members of C&T founded Asiliant Technologies in January 2000 to continue the support of the CHIPS 65545, 65550, 65555, 69000, 69030, and other notebook and LCD oriented graphics ICs. Intel licensed the rights to build, sell, and service the C&T chips to Asiliant. Asiliant manufactured and sold C&T components for the next few years until it closed.
x86 products
C&T SuperMath J38700DX was an 80387DX compatible FPUcoprocessor. C&T also designed a 386-compatible microprocessor known as the Super386 38600DX/38600SX using clean room design techniques, but this chip never enjoyed as much success as the 386 CPUs produced by Intel, AMD, and Cyrix. C&T 38605DX had 512 byte cache, but the 144 pin PGA package was incompatible with 386 socket.
82C206 chip, introduced by C&T in 1986 and the core of the NEAT chipset. This chip, like its predecessor the 82C100, provided equivalent functionality to the TTL chips on the PC/AT's mainboard, namely: the 82284clock generator, the 82288 bus controller, the 8254 Programmable Interval Timer, the two 8259 Programmable Interrupt Controllers, the two 8237 DMA controllers, the MC146818 NVRAM/RTC chip.
82C235 - Single Chip AT - Released in 1989, compatible with PC/AT. Supported LIM EMS 4.0, up to 16 MB memory and Shadow RAM.
82C836 - Single Chip 386sx AT - Compatible with PC/AT, supported all the features of SCAT, added support for the i386SX processor and i387SXmath coprocessor.
Video chips
Chips and Technologies was the first company to deliver an EGA-compatible chipset. The Enhanced Graphics CHIPSet consisted of the four chips:
82C431 Graphics Controller
82C432 Sequencer
82C433 Attributes Controller
82C434 CRT Controller
Later C&T announced a "Super EGA" dual-chip chipset: 82C435 Enhanced Graphics Controller and 82A436 Bus Interface with resolution up to 800×600 38MHz. C&T was the first company to deliver a compatible VGA chipset, the 82C451, and VGA cards were introduced the same year as VGA based on the 82C451, opening up the IBM compatible graphics display market. This market was then entered by companies such as Trident Microsystems, Western Digital, Cirrus Logic, Oak Technology, and others, until it was saturated. Chips and Technologies provided the Winginevideo card, a very high speedframebuffer that sat in a proprietary local bus slot on supported motherboards. Epson and JCIS were two manufacturers who offered motherboards featuring the Wingine local bus slot. The Wingine was popular with users of NEXTSTEP for Intel processors, as it was one of the highest performing video cards supported by the operating system. Latest HiQVision architecture added a hardware acceleration. Apple used a number of C&T controllers in their PowerBook line. Among others, the 65550 was used in the PowerBook 3400 and the faster 65554 was used in the "Kanga" PowerBook G3, which was derived from the 3400. Early NuBus PowerBooks such as the PowerBook 1400 used the less-sophisticated 65525A. C&T eventually ended up competing in the low end of the video market, the 65555 featured an LVDS transmitter and notably won a design in early Compaq Armada laptops.
