Which Silicon Valley company developed the SPARC processor architecture?

Sun Microsystems developed the SPARC processor architecture.

SPARC—short for Scalable Processor Architecture—is a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architecture. Sun created it as it moved away from Motorola 68000 processors and toward RISC-based workstations and servers. The first version was developed in 1986 and began shipping in Sun systems in 1987.

SPARC was influenced by the Berkeley RISC research project. Sun later promoted the architecture through SPARC International, allowing companies such as Fujitsu, Texas Instruments, and Cypress Semiconductor to license and manufacture compatible processors. That means other companies built SPARC chips, but Sun is the canonical answer for the architecture’s original developer.

The first implementation appeared in Sun-4 systems. SPARC V9, released in 1993, expanded the design to 64 bits. After Oracle acquired Sun in 2010, Oracle continued SPARC development before ending new SPARC processor design in 2017.