Western Digital Corporation

Company Pedigree

Ascendant Companies		Descendent Companies
Company	Comments	Company	Comments
Motorola	Founded by former Motorola employee, Alvin Phillips. Western Digital was originally called General Digital Corporation.
Tandon Corporation	Bought Tandon's disk drive division in 1988.

Company Overview

Western Digital Corporation was founded in 1970. Today, Western Digital is best known for its disk drives, however Western Digital didn't started making disk drives until 1988. In the mid-70's, Western Digital was the largest independent producer of calculator chips. In the 1980's Western Digital focus moved to PC's and developed controllers for floppy and hard disk drives. In, 1988 with the purchase of Tandon's disk drives, Western Digital's focused on supplying the PC industry with disk drives.

Major Achievements

Key Architects of IDE and EIDE standards

1st floppy disk controller, 1976
1st single-chip Winchester disk drive controller, 1982
1st Winchester disk controller board for IBM PC/AT, 1984
1st two-platter, 3.5-inch, 340-megabyte drive, 1993
1st 3.5-inch, 1-gigabyte, 3-platter Enhanced IDE drive, 1994
1st 1.6-gigabyte EIDE drive, 1995

Chip Identification

Western Digital Chips

Microprocessors
CPU's	MP/MCP1600, CP9008 (16-bit, 1Q79)
MCU's	WD40 (CR2872) (4-bit,3Q77)
Bit-Slice
Memory Devices
RAM
ROM
PROM
EPROM
EEPROM
CCD Memory
Bubble Memory
General Use Support Chips
Shift Registers
Interfaces
Communications

Second Sourced Chips

Microprocessors
CPU's	None
MCU's	None
Bit-Slice	None
Memory Devices
RAM	None
ROM	None
PROM	None
EPROM	None
EEPROM	None
CCD Memory	None
Bubble Memory	None
General Use Support Chips
Shift Registers	None
Interfaces	None
Communications	None