The Western Design Center (WDC), located in Mesa, Arizona, is a company that develops intellectual property for, and licenses manufacture of, MOS Technology 65xx based microprocessors and microcontrollers. WDC was founded in 1978 by a former MOS Technology employee and co-holder of the MOS Technology 6502 patent, Bill Mensch. Prior to leaving MOS Technology in 1977 Bill was the microprocessor design manager at MOS Technology.
Beyond discrete devices, WDC offers device designs in the form of semiconductor intellectual property cores (IP cores) to use inside other chips such as application-specific integrated circuit (ASICs), and provides ASIC and embedded systems consulting services revolving around their processor designs. WDC also produces C compilers, assembler/linker packages, simulators, development–evaluation printed circuit boards, and in-circuit emulators for their processors.
