MicroUnity
| Industry | Computer hardware and software |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1988 |
| Headquarters | Santa Clara, California, USA |
| Key people | John Moussouris |
| Website | www.microunity.com |
MicroUnity is a private company located in Santa Clara, California. The company was one of the first promoting mediaprocessors, that is, CPUs tailored for digital media such as digital video and digital audio streams.
Founders
The company was founded in 1988 by John Moussouris, who was one of the founders of MIPS Computer Systems and one of designers for the IBM 801 (one of the earliest RISC CPUs). Craig Hansen is the chief architect, a role he held earlier at MIPS. The company kept its initial product secret until 1995 when it debuted at a computer industry conference.
Funding
The company's initial product plans included advanced semiconductor fabrication techniques, new microarchitecture and instruction set features, advanced system design and packaging. To fund these wide range of activities, the company raised over $200 million. The company was funded by such industry giants such as Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, TCI (now AT&T Broadband), Time Warner, Cox Communications, Motorola and Comcast, among others. William Randolph Hearst III, one of the major investors in TCI was also a major investor in MicroUnity. It was one of the last start-up companies to build its own semiconductor fabrication plant.
Their product consisted of multiple chips - the mediaprocessor, a companion chip, a specialized memory interface device. Moussouris used the term agile processors to describe software-programmable devices which could replace a multitude of fixed-function devices. The company built a prototype system using their proprietary BiCMOS semiconductor process. This system achieved its target frequency of 1GHz but proved to be too power hungry to be used in its target markets such as cable or satellite set-top boxes. A follow-on system was built using the more common-place CMOS process, but the follow-on only ran at 300MHz. Neither systems attracted any customers due to their high cost and power dissipation.
Failure
With this failure, the company decreased its headcount from a peak of 200 to a small handful of employees. For several years, the company survived by selling a CAD tool dealing with optical proximity correction. In 1999, this CAD tool division of MicroUnity was sold to ASML Holding.
In 2005, the company received $300 million as settlement for a patent infringement lawsuit against Intel. The lawsuit alleged that MicroUnity's patents on SIMD instructions and multithreading were violated. The company is currently pursuing litigation against other technology companies.
Within Silicon Valley, MicroUnity was known as one of most secretive and ambitious start-up companies. It was extremely unusual for a start-up company to pursue innovations in several fields simultaneously - semiconductor processing, system design, chip architecture, software algorithms. It was also known as one of the largest financial failures among start-up companies in the history of high-tech business. Given the company's overly ambitious goals, Silicon Valley insiders had nicknamed the company MicroLunacy.