The original Intersil, Inc. was founded in 1967 by the Swiss physicist Jean Hoerni to develop digital watch Integrated Circuits (ICs). The European subsidiary Eurosil was originally partially funded by SSIH, a Swiss watch company. Later-on, Intersil had a development contract with the Japanese company Daini Seikosha and became supplier of low-voltage CMOS watch ICs for Seiko. When microprocessors emerged to the market in the 1970s, Intersil participated with its 12-bit IM6100, which was the first microprocessor produced in CMOS technology and emulated the PDP-8 instruction set.