Bipolar Integrated Technology, Inc. (BIT), later Bit, Inc., was a privately held

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity between that of a conductor and an insulator. Its conductivity can be modified by adding impurities (" doping") to its crystal structure. When two regions with different doping level ...

company based in

Beaverton, Oregon Beaverton is a city in the Tualatin Valley, located in Washington County in the U.S. state of Oregon, with a small portion bordering Portland. The city is among the main cities that make up the Portland metropolitan area. Its population was ...

, which sold products implemented with

emitter-coupled logic In electronics, emitter-coupled logic (ECL) is a high-speed integrated circuit bipolar transistor logic family. ECL uses a bipolar junction transistor (BJT) differential amplifier with single-ended input and limited emitter current to avoid th ...

technology. The company was founded in 1983 by former

Floating Point Systems Floating Point Systems, Inc. (FPS), was a Beaverton, Oregon vendor of attached array processors and minisupercomputers. The company was founded in 1970 by former Tektronix engineer Norm Winningstad, with partners Tom Prints, Frank Bouton and Rob ...

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

, and

Tektronix Tektronix, Inc., historically widely known as Tek, is an American company best known for manufacturing test and measurement devices such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. Originally an independent c ...

engineers. The company, which occupied a 46,000-square-foot manufacturing facility at the

Oregon Graduate Center The Oregon Graduate Center was a unique, private, postgraduate-only research university in Washington County, Oregon, on the west side of Portland, from 1963 to 2001. The center was renamed the Oregon Graduate Institute in 1989. The Institute ...

, raised $36 million in start-up capital within three years of its foundation. BIT B2110 die

The initial product was a

floating-point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic on subsets of real numbers formed by a ''significand'' (a Sign (mathematics), signed sequence of a fixed number of digits in some Radix, base) multiplied by an integer power of that ba ...

co-processor

chipset In a computer system, a chipset is a set of electronic components on one or more integrated circuits that manages the data flow between the processor, memory and peripherals. The chipset is usually found on the motherboard of computers. Chips ...

. Later, the company produced the B5000 SPARC ECL

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor (computing), processor for which the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit (IC), or a small number of ICs. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, a ...

(never reached production in a

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

product, though used by

). They also produced the

R6000 The R6000 is a microprocessor chip set developed by MIPS Computer Systems that implemented the MIPS II instruction set architecture (ISA). The chip set consisted of the R6000 microprocessor, R6010 floating-point unit and R6020 system bus control ...

MIPS ECL microprocessor, which did reach production as a MIPS

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a type of general-purpose computer mostly developed from the mid-1960s, built significantly smaller and sold at a much lower price than mainframe computers . By 21st century-standards however, a mini is ...

. Initial yields of the R6000 were very poor, leading to parts shortages for

MIPS Computer Systems MIPS Tech LLC, formerly MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. and MIPS Technologies, Inc., is an American fabless semiconductor design company that is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of RISC CPU chips based on it. MIP ...

; the latter company attributed their first quarterly loss in October 1990 to BIT. The two signed an agreement in June 1991 to allow BIT to market the R6000 on the open market, dissolving the previous exclusivity agreement with MIPS. Under its new president Fred Hanson, BIT had its first profitable year in 1991, reaching peak revenues of $20 million. Revenues dropped the following year to about $10 million, however, after it had lost four of its largest customers, including MIPS, Floating Point, and

Control Data Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer company that in the 1960s was one of the nine major U.S. computer A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), ...

. The company eventually entered the

telecommunications Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information over a distance using electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communication technologies. These means of ...

market with Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) devices and

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

switches. The company was acquired by

PMC-Sierra PMC-Sierra was a global fabless semiconductor company with offices worldwide that developed and sold semiconductor devices into the storage, communications, optical networking, printing, and embedded computing marketplaces. On January 15, 2016 ...

in September 1996 for these later communications products.

References

External links

{{Tech-company-stub 1983 establishments in Oregon 1996 disestablishments in Oregon American companies established in 1983 American companies disestablished in 1996 Beaverton, Oregon Computer companies established in 1983 Computer companies disestablished in 1996 Defunct companies based in Oregon Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States