Wei Yen

Major contributor to the Cydra-5 mini-supercomputer, Yen is a software developer and entrepreneur who has been involved with several companies, including as chairman and founder of AiLive. He and his brother David Yen published the paper "Data Coherence Problem in a Multicache System" along with King-sun Fu, which 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.

He has served as Senior Vice President of SGI, but in 1996, he left SGI and founded TVsoft, a maker of interactive software for television setup devices. It was renamed Navio, a company that merged with Oracle's Network Computer (NCI). It became Liberate and then went public in July 1999. Yen's company went up at a $12 billion valuation in early 2000 with a revenue run rate of $25 million.

He also founded a company called ArtX, staffed with former SGI graphics engineers. ArtX received the contract to deliver the Nintendo GameCube's Flipper graphics chip. The company was acquired in February 2000 for $400 million by ATI, and the acquisition led to the greatly improved R300 graphics chip family. Yen later joined ATI's board of directors.

He has served as the chairman and founder of AiLive, the company that partnered with Nintendo in developing software tools for programmers working with the Wii Remote controller and Wii MotionPlus attachment.