Wei Yen

Dr. Wei Yen Wei Yen
Born	China
Residence	San Francisco
Alma mater	Purdue University
Occupation	Software Developer and Entrepreneur

Dr. Wei Yen (颜维群) is a Chinese American software developer and entrepreneur. He has been involved with several companies, including most recently as Chairman and Founder of AiLive.

Dr. Yen received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in Operating Systems and Artificial Intelligence from Purdue University. Dr. Yen and his brother David Yen along with King-sun Fu published the paper "Data Coherence Problem in a Multicache System" that describes a practical cache coherence protocol.

Yen served as the Director of Software Engineering for Cydrome Inc, where he worked with his brother David, who served as the Director of Hardware Engineering. They were the major contributors to the Cydra-5 mini-supercomputer. The system was a combination of a VLIW ECL-based processor used for scientific applications and a multi-processor system designed for a bus architecture based on their Cache Coherence protocol.

Yen served as Senior Vice President of SGI from 1988 to 1995, where he led development on OpenGL and also served as President of subsidiary MIPS Technologies. In 1995, he left SGI and founded TVsoft, a maker of interactive software for television setup devices. The company was renamed Navio and later merged with Oracle's Network Computer (NC). Subsequently, the company went public as Liberate Technologies in July 1999. Its public offering reached a $12 billion valuation in early 2000 with a revenue run rate of $25 million.

In parallel, Yen founded a company called ArtX, employed with former SGI graphics engineers. ArtX received the contract to deliver the Nintendo Gamecube's Flipper graphics chip. The company was acquired by ATI in February 2000 for $400 million. This led to ATi's greatly improved R300 graphics chip family. Yen later joined ATI's board of directors.

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