SiliconSystems

Western Digital Corporation

Type	Public
Traded as	NASDAQ: WDC NASDAQ-100 Component S&P 500 Component
Industry	Computer data storage
Founded	April 23, 1970; 46 years ago (1970-04-23)
Headquarters	Irvine, California, United States
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Stephen D. Milligan (CEO)
Products	Hard disk drives hybrid drives solid-state drives
Revenue	$14.57 billion (2015)
Operating income	$1.61 billion (2015)
Net income	$1.46 billion (2015)
Total assets	$15.18 billion (2015)
Total equity	$9.21 billion (2015)
Number of employees	76,449 (2015)
Subsidiaries	HGST SanDisk
Website	www.wdc.com

Western Digital Corporation (commonly referred to as Western Digital and often abbreviated as WDC or WD) is an American computer data storage company and one of the largest computer hard disk drive manufacturers in the world, along with Seagate Technology.

Western Digital Corporation has a long history in the electronics industry as an integrated circuit maker and a storage products company. Western Digital was founded on April 23, 1970, by Alvin B. Phillips, a Motorola employee, as General Digital, initially (and briefly) a manufacturer of MOS test equipment. It rapidly became a speciality semiconductor maker, with start-up capital provided by several individual investors and industrial giant Emerson Electric. Around July 1971, it adopted its current name and soon introduced its first product, the WD1402A UART.

Initially financed with start-up capital provided by investors and Emerson Electric Company, WDC made its money by selling calculator chips through the early years of the 1970s, and by 1975 WDC was the largest independent calculator chip maker in the world. The oil crisis of the mid-1970s and the bankruptcy of its biggest calculator customer, Bowmar Instrument, changed its fortunes, however, and in 1976 Western Digital declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. After this, Emerson withdrew their support of the company, and WDC was on its own.

WDC introduced several landmark products during this time, including the MCP-1600 multi-chip, microcoded CPU. The MCP-1600 was used to implement DEC's LSI-11 system and their own Pascal MicroEngine microcomputer which ran the UCSD p-System Version III and UCSD Pascal. The processor was also used in several single-chip floppy disk drive controller chips, notably the FD1771. However, the WD integrated circuit that arguably drove Western's forward integration was the 1771 chip, the first disk drive formatter/controller, replacing boards of TTL logic. Despite a price far higher than average CMOS chips of the time, it was very successful and extremely profitable.