Ross Technology, Inc.

Ross Technology, Inc. was a semiconductor design and manufacturing company, specializing in SPARC microprocessors. It was founded in Austin, Texas in 1988 by Dr. Roger D. Ross, a leading computer scientist who headed Motorola's Advanced Microprocessor Division and directed the developments of Motorola's MC68030 and RISC-based 88k microprocessor families.

Dr. Ross was accompanied by a group of other key engineers from Motorola's High-end Microprocessor Division and later was joined by Raju Vegesna from AMD, who was originally hired by Dr. Ross at Motorola.

The new company was immediately tied up in multi-million dollar lawsuits by both Motorola and AMD but after a strong legal defense was organized by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Ross was able to settle the suits under highly favorable conditions.

Cypress Semiconductor provided initial funding. Original board members included Dr. Ross and well-known figures as Dr. T. J. Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductor, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Venture Capital, and L. J. Sevin of Sevin Rosen Venture Capital, who also served as Board Chairman.

After several government oversight committee hearings in Washington D.C., Fujitsu was allowed to become the majority shareholder in the early 1990s and except for Dr. Ross, who was named chairman, replaced the existing Board of Directors with its own members, and eventually acquired most of Ross' intellectual property and assets.

The company was taken public by Robertson, Stephens & Company on November 7, 1995, but Fujitsu kept a controlling interest in the company and continued to control the Board of Directors. Sun Microsystems also took a 10% interest in the company and was allowed to name a director as well.

Ross was a significant part of the hardware ecosystem of Sun's SPARC-based systems of the time. They participated in the design of the MBus architecture, and it was Ross Technology's 605 based Pinnacle product line that launched Sun servers into the 2x and 4x multi-processor arena which prior to Ross were confined to single processor server offerings.

Ross also later produced the "hyperSPARC" processor, viewed first as a competitor to Sun's own SPARC processor designs, but eventually adopted by Sun and sold both as upgrades and system components.

It was an emergency engineering-wide Ross hyperSPARC upgrade which enabled Steve Job's Pixar to complete and deliver their animated movie "Toy Story" to Disney on schedule after the existing Sun Microsystems machines were overwhelmed in the late product development stage by Pixar's demanding new technology.

Ross additionally pioneered and commercialized many aspects of the now common multi-chip microprocessor packaging technology utilized by Intel and AMD.

Roger D. Ross, President & Chairman, eventually split with the new Board of Directors and resigned due to sharp strategic and cultural differences in 1996 and was replaced with a president with large corporation experience and accomplishments but lacking a high technology computer or entrepreneurial background.

The company's stock eventually fell below NASDAQ requirements and was delisted in 1997.

Ross Technology closed down in 1998 and all its assets and patents became the property of Fujitsu Ltd.