Trident Microsystems

Trident Microsystems is a manufacturer of display - processors for flat panel displays such as LCDs or plasma. By mid 2003, Trident was also a supplier of graphics chips for PCs. Trident Microsystems was founded in 1987, since 1992, the shares are traded on the NASDAQ under the symbol " TRID ".

History

In the late 1980 Trident was announced together with Oak Technology for cheap, relatively slow graphics chip. Especially the TVGA - 8900C was used in many PCs of the time.

Mid-1990 Trident could unlock the TVGA - 9680 even at the then market leader S3 Inc., but lost by the advent of 3D graphics chips to connect again.

Although Trident developed with the Blade 3D ​​, the Blade XP or XP 4 more 3D accelerator, but the products were always much slower than the competition and were therefore hardly used by graphics card manufacturers.

There were also some attempts to integrate the graphics cores in motherboard chipsets, the most famous is probably the VIA MVP4, but these attempts were of limited success.

Something different it looked in the notebook market. Since there 3D acceleration became popular much later, Trident was able to achieve some success with graphics chip with embedded DRAM. However, it later lost in this market connection.

Because of this bad market situation, a restructuring announced Trident 2003 and as a result the graphics division in mid-2003 was sold to XGI Technology.

2009 took over Trident three product lines of the " Consumer " Micronas and NXP Semiconductors the fields of " Digital TV" and " set top box ".

In January 2012, applied for Trident in the United States Bankruptcy under Chapter 11

Graphics chips

Desktop

  • 8800: (1988 ) - the first SVGA chip Trident (ISA ) with 512 KB of memory.
  • 8900: High- Color support, 1 MB of memory.
  • 9000: Single - chip solution for low-cost graphics cards.
  • 92xx, 94xx: The first Windows Accelerator Trident.
  • 9440: (1994 ) - for the first time the performance was at the level of competition (2 MB memory, PCI / VLB).
  • 9660: similar to the 9440 but with 64-bit.
  • 9680, 9682, 9685: multimedia accelerator for video playback.
  • 3DImage975, 3DImage985: (1997) - The first 3D accelerator Trident (4 MB memory, PCI / AGP).
  • Blade3D: (1999) - The next generation of 3D accelerator. Was, inter alia, integrated into the VIA MVP4 (8 MB memory, PCI / AGP).
  • Blade XP
  • XP4: Last 3D chip Trident. Kam never really on the market, but was later sold by XGI Volari V3 and as Volari XP5.

Notebook

  • 93xx
  • 9525DVD
  • Cyberblade
Types of business entity Santa Clara, California Industry Standard Architecture
783839
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