Bipolar Integrated Technology was a
semiconductor
A semiconductor is a material which has an electrical conductivity value falling between that of a conductor, such as copper, and an insulator, such as glass. Its resistivity falls as its temperature rises; metals behave in the opposite way. ...
company based in
Beaverton, Oregon
Beaverton is a city in Washington County, in the U.S. state of Oregon with a small portion bordering Portland in the Tualatin Valley. The city is among the main cities that make up the Portland metropolitan area. Its population was 97,494 at ...
which sold products implemented with
ECL technology. The company was founded in 1983 by former
Floating Point Systems,
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...
, 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 ...
engineers.
The initial product was a
Floating point
In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can be r ...
coprocessor chip set. Later, the company produced the B5000
SPARC
SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system developed ...
ECL
microprocessor
A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circu ...
(never reached production in a
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...
product, though used by
Floating Point Systems) and the
R6000 MIPS ECL microprocessor (which did reach production as a MIPS
minicomputer
A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ...
). The manufacture of these processors were never really reliable, thus making them prohibitively expensive when compared to competing
CMOS products. The company entered the
telecommunications
Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than tha ...
market with
ATM
ATM or atm often refers to:
* Atmosphere (unit) or atm, a unit of atmospheric pressure
* Automated teller machine, a cash dispenser or cash machine
ATM or atm may also refer to:
Computing
* ATM (computer), a ZX Spectrum clone developed in Mo ...
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 ...
switches. The company was eventually acquired by
PMC-Sierra in 1996 for these later communications products.
Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States
Defunct companies based in Oregon
Beaverton, Oregon
Companies established in 1983
1983 establishments in Oregon
1996 disestablishments in Oregon
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