Trident Microsystems
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| Public | |
| Traded as | NASDAQ: TRID |
| Industry | Fabless semiconductors |
| Fate | Bankruptcy |
| Founded | 1987 |
| Founder | Frank C. Lin |
| Defunct | 2012 |
| Headquarters | Santa Clara, California, USA |
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Key people
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| Products | TVGA 8900C, TVGA 9000, TGUI 9440, Cyber 9525DVD, SVP-EX, SVP-LX, SVP-CX, SVP-PX, 4DWave DX, 4DWave NX |
| Brands | TVGA, DPTV, SVP, DCRe, HiDTV |
| Revenue | US$271 million (FY 2007) |
| $40 million (FY 2007) | |
| $30 million (FY 2007) | |
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Number of employees
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565 (2008) |
| Website | www |
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Footnotes / references |
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Trident Microsystems was a fabless semiconductor company that in the 1990s was a well-known supplier of graphics chipsets used in video cards and on motherboards for desktop PCs and laptops. In 2003, it transformed itself into being a supplier of display processors for digital televisions (primarily LCD TVs) and achieved success starting from 2005, at a time when the global LCD TV market started showing strong growth.
It filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2012 and the delisting of its common stock from the NASDAQ stock market was announced shortly thereafter.
Established in 1987, Trident 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 color monitor and later multi-resolution SVGA output) to more advanced 2D hardware acceleration such a BitBLT engine and color-space conversion (not to be confused with 3D hardware-acceleration), Trident continued its strategy of selling modestly performing chips at compelling price points. 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 memory on a single chip. The resulting combo-chip saved precious board-space by eliminating several RAM chips normally required for framebuffer storage as well as providing other advantages, offset by a higher manufacturing cost-per-bit. In this market it competed with NeoMagic.
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