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 independant manufacturer of motherboard chipsets.
The company was founded in 1987 from the Symphony Company in Silicon Valley by among others Wen Chi Chen (who was employed at Intel before joining Symphony) who is still CEO of the company. Chen transfered 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 Cyrix, then a division of National Semiconductor, marking their entry into the microprocessor market. They are the makers of the VIA C3 processor.