Trident Microsystems

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An old Trident SVGA card with TVGA9000 chip.

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.

[edit] History

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.

[edit] Graphics chipsets

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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)
3DImage975, 3DImage985 - 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.