OPTi Inc. was a fabless semiconductor company based in Milpitas, California, that primarily manufactured chipsets for personal computers.

Cash-strapped on a "shoe-string [budget]" on its foundation,[2] among the company's first products was a trio of VLSI chipsets for i386SX- and i486-equipped AT motherboards.

[9][10] Later in 1992, they introduced a programmable writethrough–writeback cache chipset for the contemporary wave of upgradable motherboards, supporting up to 64 MB of RAM and processors by Intel, Cyrix, and AMD.

[2][13] Although considered a small company,[14] OPTi's initial public offering in 1993 proved successful in the short term.

[26][27] In 1997,[28] OPTi and Singapore-based TriTech Microelectronics were sued by Crystal Semiconductor, a subsidiary of Cirrus Logic, for alleged patent infringement of Crystal's mixed-signal technology used in the audio component of the Viper-M chipset,[29] which OPTi designed around being compatible with Intel's Native Signal Processing technology.

[30] The courts ruled in favor of Crystal in late 1999 or early 2000, ordering TriTech and OPTi to pay their portion of a combined $20 million.

[28] OPTi found itself unable to compete against Intel's newfound dominance in the chipset market, with sales all but disappearing by late 1998.

[12] Marren, who had been a board director since 1996,[2] steered the company away from the chipset business in 1999, in favor of developing microcontrollers for notebooks,[31] chiefly LCDs and USB and IEEE 1394 (FireWire) serial buses.

[1] These products however barely broke even,[12] and in September 2001, OPTi's board of directors voted unanimously to dissolve the company, subject to approval in November 2001.