http://www.ant.co.uk/com/ftdi/company.html (The Risc Disc Volume 2, 10/1995)

Company Background

Future Technology Devices International Ltd (FTDI) is a Scottish based company which researches, designs and develops innovative products for the Personal Computer market.
[FTDI staff] [FTDI products].

FTDI is the sister company of Computer Design Concepts Ltd (CDCL). CDCL was set up in 1986 as a design consultancy specialising in the area of Personal Computer systems. CDCL developed a range of products for a variety of customers, mainly in the Far East.

In 1991 it was decided that the experience and market knowledge of the company was sufficient to develop a proprietary brand Chip Set. To differentiate between the design consultancy activities and the proprietary product developments it was decided to form FTDI.

The two companies have an unrivalled understanding of the ASIC design process which has led to the development of our own design tools. These allow the creation of complex new designs in extremely short time scales. With sufficient financial resources this allows us to bring state of the art product to the market place ahead of the competition.

In the four years that FTDI has been developing and selling proprietary chip sets we have had several major successes. The most notable of these being the use of FTDI chip sets in the PS1 and Ambra ranges of IBM products and more recently our incorporation into the Aptiva range. This has established FTDI as a leading player in the PC chip set market as well as Europe's only indigenous PC chip set design house.

Since its inception in 1986 CDCL, and more recently FTDI, has produced a number of successful PC based designs. These include early chip sets and motherboards designed for Asian customers, the FTD3000 386/486 chip set, the FTD4000 486/Pentium chip set and the FTD5000 Pentium P54 chip set.

Being a technology driven company we keep abreast of all the latest developments in the PC field - as members of groups such as the Universal Serial Bus Implementors Forum we maintain our position at the leading edge of PC technologies.

We also develop customised versions of our chip set products for OEM use. Our client list to date includes IBM, NEC Corporation, Bull Information Systems and Acorn Computers.

In a joint development with Aleph One Ltd of Cambridge we developed a highly succesful 486 PC card for the Acorn RISC PC range. This card enables full PC compatibility within Acorn's operating system.

Feedback on this product included

'PC Perfection' - from the front cover of Acorn Archimedes World, April 1995.
'it's solution is so much cheaper and elegant than those on other non-PC platforms' - from a review in the Acorn User, March 1995.
'I'd even challenge a regular PC user to be able to tell if they were using a real PC or not' - from Personal Computer World, June 1995.

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