Trident Microsystems

» see tridentmicro.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Trident made the graphics chip you got when you did not pick one. It arrived soldered to the motherboard of an assembled PC, or on a card the shop threw into the box, and the decision had been made a level above you by whoever was buying components cheaply that quarter. In Turkey in the late 1990s that covered most machines in most houses and it covered the internet cafes too. The chip was slow, and almost nobody cared, because the argument for paying more for a better one had to be made in a market where the whole PC was already the expensive object.

The company was founded in 1987 in Santa Clara, California by Frank C. Lin, and it was fabless from the beginning, which in the late 1980s was still an unusual way to run a semiconductor business. Its reputation came from the TVGA line: inexpensive SVGA parts that were slower than what Tseng Labs or S3 shipped and cost the board makers considerably less. Later generations carried the TGUI and Blade3D names, and Blade3D is where Trident tried to build something that would win on performance.

It did not get there. Intel began building graphics into its own chipsets, and the bottom of the discrete market, which was the only ground Trident had ever held, stopped being a market at all. Management announced a substantial restructuring in June 2003. By the end of that year XGI had completed the purchase of the graphics division, and sixteen years of PC graphics were over.

The second Trident was a television chip company and for a few years it was the better business. It moved into LCD TV controllers and found real customers in 2005, taking revenue from 69 million dollars in fiscal 2005 to 270 million in fiscal 2007 on 30 million of net income. Then it collapsed to 76 million by fiscal 2009. Buying TDK-Micronas assets in May 2009 and closing on NXP's television business in February 2010 made the company larger without making it profitable. It filed for Chapter 11 on 4 January 2012.

~ the chronicle ~

~ sold in three pieces ~

Entropic Communications took the set-top box operations for 60 million dollars in February 2012 and Sigma Designs took the digital television chip business. In June, Cambridge Silicon Radio bought the audio products for one million dollars. That last figure is the useful one: a product line inside a company that had turned over a quarter of a billion dollars five years earlier went for the price of a house in a good neighborhood.

~ the options ~

On 16 July 2010 the SEC settled charges over stock option backdating running from 1993 to May 2006. The allegation was that grant dates had been chosen in hindsight to land on days with low closing prices, and that pre-tax income had been overstated by as much as 113 percent across several fiscal years. Frank Lin, who had been chairman and chief executive since founding the company, paid a 350,000 dollar penalty and disgorged 817,509 dollars plus interest. He also took a five year bar from serving as an officer or director of a public company. The former chief accounting officer, Peter Y. Jen, settled on smaller numbers. All parties settled without admitting or denying the allegations.

Lin had already left the chief executive role in 2006. The backdating years line up almost exactly with the years Trident was a graphics company, which means the era the chip is remembered for was also the era the SEC eventually described as a fraudulent and deceptive scheme to pay executives without saying so.

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