Trident Microsystems

Trident Microsystems is a supplier of display-processors for flat panel displays (plasma, LCD, etc.). At one time, Trident was also a supplier of PC graphics chipsets and sound controllers.

History

Established in 1987, late in the 1980s, Trident (along with Oak Technologies) gained a reputation for selling inexpensive (for the time) but slow SVGA chipsets. Many OEMs built add-in-boards using Trident VGA chipsets. As the PC graphics market shifted from simple framebuffer displays (basic VGA colour monitor output) to more advanced hardware acceleration (multi-resolution, SVGA output; not to be confused with 3D hardware-acceleration), Trident continued its strategy of selling modestly performing chips at compelling pricepoints. In the mid-1990s, the company (briefly) caught up with its main competition: the TGUI-9680's feature-set was comparable to the S3 Graphics Trio64V+, although the Trio64V+ outperformed the 9680 in true-color mode.

The rapid introduction of 3D-graphics caught many graphics suppliers off guard, including Trident. It was not until the late 1990s that Trident finally released a competitive chip, the TGUI-9880 (Blade3D.) By this time, Trident's reach had once again retreated to the low-end OEM market, where it was crowded by ATI, S3, and SiS.

Meanwhile, in the laptop market, Trident was an early pioneer of embedded-DRAM, a semiconductor manufacturing technique which combines a graphics-controller and framebuffer-RAM on a single chip. The resulting combo-chip saved precious board-space by eliminating several RAM chips normally required for framebuffer storage.

Although Trident enjoyed some success with its 3DImage and Blade3D product-lines, the entry of Intel into PC graphics signalled the end of the bottom-end, graphics-chip market. Trident partnered with motherboard chipset suppliers several times to integrate its graphics technology into a motherboard chipset (i.e. ALi Cyber­ALADDiN, VIA PLE133), but these achieved marginal success. Faced with a contracting market and rising research and development costs (due to the increasing sophistication of 3D-graphics rendering), Trident announced in June, 2003, a substantial restructuring of the company.

In late 2003, XGI completed an acquisition of Trident's former graphics division.

Graphics chipsets

The following lists are not complete.

Desktop
* 8800 (1988) - first S/VGA compatible chipset (ISA), 512KB framebuffer
* 8900 - high-color (65,536) display-mode support, 1MB framebuffer
* 9000 - first integrated (VGA+RAMDAC) VGA chipset
**9000B (1992)
**9000i-1 (1994) - appeared on Trident's VC512TM ISA video cards
* 92xx, 94xx - first Windows accelerators
* 9440 (1994) - first performance competitive Windows 2D-accelerator (2MB PCI/VLB)
* 9660 - similar to 9440, 64-bit datapath
* 9680, 9682, 9685 - motion video accelerator (zoom + YUV->RGB, Directdraw overlay)
* 3DImage9750, 3DImage9850 - first Windows 3D-accelerators (4MB PCI/AGP)
* Blade3D (1999) - first performance competitive Windows 3D-accelerators (8MB PCI/AGP)
*Blade XP
*XP4 - DirectX 8 chip.
*XP4E - AGP8x support.
*XP8 (cancelled) - DirectX 9 chip, marketed for under $100US.
*XP10 (cancelled) - PCI Express controller.Mobile
* Cyber9320
* Cyber9382
* Cyber9385
* Cyber9397 and Cyber9397DVD
* 9525DVD
* CyberBlade
** CyberBlade Ai1
** CyberBlade e4-128
**CyberBlade i1
** CyberBlade i7
*Blade XP
*XP4
**XP4m16/XP4m32 - embedded memory.
*XP8 (cancelled) - DirectX 9 chip.Integrated
*ALi CyberALADDiN-T ()
*ALi CyberALADDiN-P4 (CyberBLADE XP2)
*? (codename Napa2T)
*? (codename Napa2-P4)
*? (codename Napa2-Banias)

Sound chipsets

* Trident 4DWAVE-DX/NX, based on the T² platform which is also used by SIS and ALi for their own audio interfaces. Supports Q3D 2.0.

External links

*http://www.tridentmicro.com