Trillium digital systems

Trillium Digital Systems, developed and licensed standards-based communications source code software to telecommunications equipment manufacturers for the wireless, broadband, Internet and telephone network infrastructure. Trillium became one of the early pioneers to license source code. ["C Comes to Telecom". Loring Wirbel. Electronic Engineering Times, April 20, 1992.] The Trillium Digital Systems business entity no longer exists, but the Trillium [http://www.trillium.com] communications software is still developed and licensed by Continuous Computing [http://www.ccpu.com] . Trillium software is used in the network infrastructure as well as associated service platforms, clients and devices.

Company History

Trillium

Trillium was founded in February 1988 in Los Angeles, California. The co-founders were Jeff Lawrence and Larisa Chistyakov. The initial capitalization of Trillium when it was incorporated was $1,000. The name Trillium came about because of a mistake. Jeff and Larisa asked for company name suggestions from family and friends. Someone suggested a character named Trillian from the book “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams. They thought the suggestion was supposed to be trillium, a flower in the lily family. They liked the sound and symbolism of the name Trillium so they used it as the name of their new company.

Trillium was started as a consulting company. Its first consulting jobs were to develop communications software for bisynchronous, asynchronous and multiprotocol PAD products. Consulting continued through the end of 1990. While consulting, the co-founders decided there was an opportunity to develop and license portable source code software for communications protocols. Towards the end of 1990 Trillium became focused on developing its own products.

Source code is a symbolic language (e.g., the C programming language) which is run through a compiler to generate binary code which can run on a particular microprocessor. Communications systems have a variety of hardware and software architectures, use a variety of microprocessors and use a variety of software development environments. It wasn’t technically possible to develop a single piece of binary code that could run on many different systems. Source code, if properly designed and supported, can provide a highly leveragable solution that can be integrated and used in many different systems. The proper way to test source code is to compile it for all possible environments it might run in and then run and test it in those environments. There were as many environments as there were pieces of communications equipment. That testing approach was difficult. To overcome this difficulty Trillium developed an operating system called the Multiprocessor Operating System (MOS) that could run under commercially available operating systems such as DOS, Windows, Solaris and Linux and provide a simulation and testing environment for its software products.

Trillium's first software product supported the the X.25 communications protocol. Subsequent products were developed for a number of data communications and voice communcations protocols. Trillium's primary focus in its early years was on control plane and signalling plane protocols. In later years Trillium also developed some data plane protocols. A more comprehensive list of the software products developed by Trillium is listed in the Product History section. Trillium is currently developing software products to support the Femtocell communications protocols. Throughout its history Trillium was also very active in standards setting bodies including the CCITT/ITU, IETF, ATM Forum, Frame Relay Forum and others.

Trillium software products were used in communications and networking products designed for the PDN, PSTN, Internet, enterprise networks and home networks.Trillium's evolution and development, paralleled the evolution and development of the communications industry. In 1988 there were less than 1/2 million Internet users, about 4 million cell phone users and no broadband (DSL, cable) users. The industry went through significant transitions from the mid-1980s through the early-2000s as described in the Market History section. By 2008 there were over 1.4 billion Internet users ["Internet World Stats" [http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm] ] , almost 3.3 billion mobile phone users ["Global cellphone penetration reaches 50 pct" Reuters, November 29, 2007. [http://investing.reuters.co.uk/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=media&storyID=nL29172095] ] and over 1 billion broadband users ["Strategy Analytics: Worldwide Broadband Subscriptions to Reach 415 Million This Year". Reuters, May 28, 2008. [http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS201314+28-May-2008+BW20080528] ] .

During this period, communications equipment manufacturers licensed source code software to reduce their time to market, decrease their development risk and reduce their costs. By 1999 many companies offered source code software products. Some of these included:

Product History

During its history, Trillium has developed over 150 software products, which parallel the evolution and development of the network infrastructure. These software products support communications protocols specified in international (e.g. ITU), national (e.g. ANSI) and industry (e.g. IETF) standards. These products are licensed primarily to telecommunications equipment manufacturers and include:

Trillium software has been used in over 500 communications and networking products.

Trillium Poster

Trillium conceived of, and published a poster that provided detailed technical information about the network infrastructure and protocols in an attractive format that was easy to understand. It became an indispensable tool for the communications industry and it was displayed on the office walls and conference rooms of tens of thousands of engineers, venture capitalists and financial analysts around the world. The poster is periodically updated to reflect changes in the network infrastructure and protocols. The 1st generation poster was published in 1997 and was inspired by the "ISO and CCITT Data Communication Standards" poster published by Retix. The 5th generation of the poster was published in 2008 [http://www.ccpu.com/poster/tour.html] .

Notes and references

Further Reading

"Trillium Digital Systems Case Study: 1988 – 1995". Jeff Lawrence, 2004. [http://www.cliviasystems.com/general/trilliumCaseStudy95.pdf]

"Trillium Digital Systems Case Study: 1996 – 2003". Jeff Lawrence, 2004. [http://www.cliviasystems.com/general/trilliumCaseStudy03.pdf]

"Trillium Digital Systems, An Intel Company. A Case Study & An Analysis of the Protocols in the Voice Over IP Arena". Shramik Jyothula and Sridhar Dronamraju. [http://ise.gmu.edu/~eschneid/infs612/projects/trillium.pdf]

"Roadmap to Entrepreneurial Success". Robert W. Price, AMACOM, 2004. [http://books.google.com/books?id=q7UzNoWdGAkC&pg=PA223&lpg=PA223&dq=trillium+digital+systems+raises+14+million&source=web&ots=uPDpnBgmEo&sig=Ce6cNfopaPc4VvbE0xu2R5GVfPs&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=7&ct=result]

"How You Can Become Ma Bell". Karen Kaplan. Los Angeles Times, March 25, 1996.

"Growing Lean". Douglas Young. Los Angeles Business Journal, December 2, 1996.

"Network Broker". Communications News. October 1998.

"Preparation Counts More Than Luck". Juan Hovey. Los Angeles Times, October 6, 1999.

External links

* [http://www.trillium.com/ Trillium Web site]