Bipolar Integrated Technology was a semiconductor

Semiconductor

A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity due to electron flow intermediate in magnitude between that of a conductor and an insulator. This means a conductivity roughly in the range of 103 to 10−8 siemens per centimeter...

 company based in Beaverton, Oregon

Beaverton, Oregon

Beaverton is a city in Washington County, Oregon, United States, seven miles west of Portland in the Tualatin River Valley.As of the 2010 census, the population is 90,267. This makes it the second-largest city in the county and Oregon's sixth-largest city...

 which sold products implemented with ECL

ECL

ECL may stand for:*ECL programming language, an extensible programming language developed at Harvard*ECL, data-centric programming language for Big Data, a declarative, data centric programming language used for data intensive supercomputing...

 technology. The company was founded in 1983 by former Floating Point Systems

Floating Point Systems

Floating Point Systems Inc. was a Beaverton, Oregon vendor of minisupercomputers. The company was founded in 1970 by former Tektronix engineer Norm Winningstad....

, Intel, and Tektronix

Tektronix

Tektronix, Inc. is an American company best known for its test and measurement equipment such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. In November 2007, Tektronix became a subsidiary of Danaher Corporation....

 engineers. The company was later renamed BIT Inc..

The initial product was a Floating point

Floating point

In computing, floating point describes a method of representing real numbers in a way that can support a wide range of values. Numbers are, in general, represented approximately to a fixed number of significant digits and scaled using an exponent. The base for the scaling is normally 2, 10 or 16...

 coprocessor

Coprocessor

A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor . Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, or encryption. By offloading processor-intensive tasks from the main processor,...

 chip set. Later, the company produced the B5000 SPARC

SPARC

SPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987....

 ECL microprocessor

Microprocessor

A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...

 (never reached production in a Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

 product, though used by Floating Point Systems

Floating Point Systems

Floating Point Systems Inc. was a Beaverton, Oregon vendor of minisupercomputers. The company was founded in 1970 by former Tektronix engineer Norm Winningstad....

) and the R6000

R6000

The R6000 is a microprocessor chip set developed by MIPS Computer Systems that implemented the MIPS II instruction set architecture . The chip set consisted of the R6000 microprocessor, R6010 floating-point unit and R6020 system bus controller. The R6000 was the first implementation of the MIPS II...

 MIPS

MIPS architecture

MIPS is a reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by MIPS Technologies . The early MIPS architectures were 32-bit, and later versions were 64-bit...

 ECL microprocessor (which did reach production as a MIPS minicomputer

Minicomputer

A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...

). The manufacture of these processors were never really reliable, thus making them prohibitively expensive when compared to competing CMOS

CMOS

Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor is a technology for constructing integrated circuits. CMOS technology is used in microprocessors, microcontrollers, static RAM, and other digital logic circuits...

 products. The company entered the telecommunications market with ATM

Asynchronous Transfer Mode

Asynchronous Transfer Mode is a standard switching technique designed to unify telecommunication and computer networks. It uses asynchronous time-division multiplexing, and it encodes data into small, fixed-sized cells. This differs from approaches such as the Internet Protocol or Ethernet that...

 devices and Ethernet

Ethernet

Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....

 switches. The company was eventually acquired by PMC-Sierra

PMC-Sierra

PMC-Sierra is a fabless semiconductor company which develops and sells devices into the communications, storage, printing, and embedded computing marketplaces.-Corporate history:...

in 1996 for these later communications products.