Weitek Corporation, or just plain Weitek, was founded in 1981 by Chi-Shin Wang, Edmund Sun and Arthur Collmeyer. They specialized in Floating point products and also used their knowledge for graphic chipsets. Besides their chips innovative design ideas they also used a new business model. Weitek was the first company to implement the fabless semiconductor business model.
This meant that the company would design chips but had to rely on third parties to manufacture the chips. On the other hand, this way Weitek avoided large capital investments into a semiconductor manufacturing facility and instead could focus on design and marketing its products.
Among floating point processors for Sparc computers like the 3170, Weitek also introduced three FPU’s for the x86 platform. Their first product was the 1167, a small PCB which contained three chips. This was intended for as a 387 math coprocessor. It was mainly used with Intels iPSC Hypercube system.
In 1988 Weitek announced the 3167 which was a single chip product of the 1167 and could be used in 386 systems with an 121 pin Extended Math Coprocessor socket.
The last product was the 4167 which was introduced in 1989. The 4167 was intended for use in 486SX systems.
No further chips were designed for the x86 market and Weitek concentrated its R&D on a new idea, the Unified Memory Architecture. This design idea integrated most logic on motherboard. Their first UMA product was the W464, later they also released the W564. Unfortunately these products did not gain great interest and Weitek went bankrupt in 1996. The remaining products and patents were sold to Rockwell.
Available Math Coprocessors
80387
- Weitek 1167
- Weitek 3167 20
- Weitek 3167 25
- Weitek 3167 33
80487
- Weitek 4167 33
