Chips

In the 1990s, a major designer and manufacturer of chipsets was VLSI Technology in Tempe, Arizona. Some of their innovations included the integration of PCI bridge logic, the GraphiCore 2D graphics accelerator and direct support for synchronous DRAM, the forerunner of DDR SDRAM memory.

The Apple Macintosh SE, Macintosh II and later the Quadras series used chipsets from VLSI Technology, even though they were ASICs designed by Apple. After the switch to PowerPC, Apple used various ASIC suppliers for their chipsets such as VLSI technology, Texas Instruments, LSI Logic or Lucent Technologies (later known as Agere Systems). When Apple switched to Intel they used traditional PC chipsets.