Wei Yen

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Dr. Wei Yen is a software developer and entrepreneur. Yen has been involved with several companies, including most recently as chairman and founder of AiLive. Dr. Yen 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.

This cache protocol was later employed as one of the examples of cache protocols that were all subsets of the Cache Coherence system employed on the Futurebus published by Paul Sweazy titled "A Class of Compatible Cache Consistency Protocols and their support by the IEEE Futurebus" in the 13th Proceedings of the ISCA in 1986.

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

Wei served as Senior Vice President of SGI. In 1996, Dr. Yen left SGI and founded TVsoft, a maker of interactive software for television settop devices. It was renamed Navio, merged with Oracle's Network Computer (NCI), became Liberate and then went public in July, 1999. It peaked at a $12B valuation in early 2000 with a revenue run rate of $25M.^[1]

In parallel, he founded a company called ArtX and staffed it with former SGI graphics engineers. ArtX received the contract to deliver the Nintendo Gamecube's Flipper graphics chip. It was acquired in February 2000 for $400M by ATI and led to the greatly improved R300 graphics chip family. Wei later joined ATI's board of directors.^[1]

Yen is the chairman and founder of AiLive. The company partnered with Nintendo in developing software tools for programmers working with the Wii Remote controller and Wii MotionPlus attachment.^[1]