Mostek

Mostek Corporation was a semiconductor integrated circuit manufacturer, founded in 1969 by L. J. Sevin, Louay E. Sharif, Richard L. Petritz and other ex-employees of Texas Instruments.In 1985, after several years of red ink and declining market share, UTC closed Mostek completely and sold it for US$71M to the French electronics firm Thomson-CSF, which later spun it off into STMicroelectronics.The resulting increased speed and lower cost of the MK4006 memory chip made it the runaway favorite to IBM and other mainframe and minicomputer manufacturers (cf.In 1970 Busicom, a Japanese adding machine manufacturer, approached Intel and Mostek with a proposal to introduce a new electronic calculator line.[6] The fear, uncertainty and doubt put up by the competition regarding address multiplexing was dispelled by the actual performance of the MK4096 which proved solid and robust in all types of computer memory designs.While most competitors took a conservative approach by simply shrinking (scaling) their 64Ks, Mostek undertook a major redesign which incorporated forward-looking features (such as controlled pre-charge current) that were not necessary at the 64K level and delayed entry into the market.With this foundation in calculator chips and high volume DRAM production, Mostek gained a reputation as a leading semiconductor "fabrication house" (fab) in the early 1970s.Architectural features included multiple nested indirect addressing and three register sets (each consisting of an accumulator, a program counter and a carry/link bit) which could be used for interrupt processing or for subroutines.Mostek was bought by United Technologies (UTC) in 1979 for US$345M to prevent an unfriendly takeover from Gould at the 10th anniversary of the company's founding, when a large block of stock options controlled by Sprague Electric became vested.UTC sacrificed Mostek's leadership position in some markets, focusing instead on the highly competitive (and eventually unprofitable) DRAM business.Eventually, on 17 October 1985, UTC gave up, closed Mostek completely, and days later sold it to Thomson-CSF, a French Government electronics company, for a mere $71 million.[16] By 1986, all United States chip makers, with the exception of Texas Instruments, Micron Technology, Motorola and IBM had stopped making DRAM[17].In 1987 Thomson spun-off and merged its semiconductor operations, including Mostek, with the Italian SGS-ATES to become STMicroelectronics, based in Geneva, Switzerland.Jerry Rogers founded Cyrix in 1988 to capitalize on the Mostek second source agreement that allowed any 80x86 processor to be legally copied, which Intel attempted to stop via lawsuits.Micron Technology was a very successful spinoff founded by a handful of Mostek employees, including Ward Parkinson, Dennis Wilson, and Doug Pitman.