ATI Technologies

ATI Technologies U.L.C., founded in 1985, is a major Canadian designer and supplier of graphics processing units and video display cards and a wholly owned subsidiary of AMD, as of October 2006.

As a fabless semiconductor company, ATI conducts research & development of chips in-house, but subcontracts the actual (silicon) manufacturing and graphics-card assembly to third-parties.

On July 24, 2006, AMD and ATI announced a plan to merge in a deal valued at US$5.4 billion. The merger closed October 25, 2006. The acquisition consideration included over $2 billion financed from a loan, as well as 56 million shares of AMD stock.

History
Lee Ka Lau, Francis Lau, Benny Lau, and Kwok Yuen Ho founded ATI in 1985 as Array Technologies Incorporated. Working primarily in the OEM field, ATI produced integrated graphics cards for PC manufacturers such as IBM and Commodore. By 1987, ATI had grown into an independent graphics card retailer, introducing EGA Wonder and VGA Wonder card product lines that year. In the early nineties they released products able to process graphics without the CPU. In May 1991 the Mach8, in 1992 the Mach32, which offered improved memory bandwidth and GUI acceleration. ATI Technologies Inc. went public in 1993 with stock listed on NASDAQ and the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Competing companies

 * NVIDIA
 * Matrox