ZiiLABS Pte Ltd. is a global electronics company, producing a line of media-oriented application processors, reference platforms and enabling software, in a series of platforms named ZMS. Its products are found in low-power consumer electronics and embedded devices, including Android-based phones and tablets.

History

ZiiLABS was founded in 1994 as

3Dlabs 3DLABS Inc. Ltd. was a fabless semiconductor company. It was founded by Yavuz Ahıska and Osman Kent in 1994 with headquarters in San Jose, California. It originally developed the GLINT and PERMEDIA high-end graphics processing unit, graphics chi ...

, which became a wholly owned subsidiary of Creative Technology Ltd in 2002. In January 2009, the company re-branded as ZiiLABS. This re-branding reflected 3Dlabs' focus on supplying low-power, media-rich application processors, hardware platforms and middleware, rather than just 3D GPUs as had previously been the case. The company announced its first applications/media processor, the ''DMS-02'' in 2005 and this has been followed by the ZMS-05, ZMS-08 and most recently the ZMS-20 and ZMS-40. The ZMS processors combine ZiiLABS’ core asset, the "Stemcell Computing Array" with ARM cores and integrated peripheral functions to create a

system on a chip A system on a chip (SoC) is an integrated circuit that combines most or all key components of a computer or Electronics, electronic system onto a single microchip. Typically, an SoC includes a central processing unit (CPU) with computer memory, ...

(SoC). As 3Dlabs the company developed the GLINT and Permedia GPUs used in both personal and workstation graphics cards. In 2002, the company acquired the Intense3D group to become a vertically integrated graphics board vendor supplying workstation graphics card under the RealiZm brand. 3Dlabs stopped developing graphics GPUs and cards in 2006 to focus on its media processor business. In November 2012,

Creative Technology Limited Creative Technology Ltd., or Creative Labs Pte Ltd., is a Singaporean multinational electronics company mainly dealing with audio technologies and products such as speakers, headphones, sound cards and other digital media. Founded by Sim Wong ...

announced it has entered into an agreement with

Intel Corporation Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer components such as central processing ...

for Intel to license certain technology and patents from ZiiLABS Inc. Ltd and acquire certain engineering resources and assets related to its UK branch as a part of a $50 million deal. ZiiLABS (still wholly owned by Creative) continues to retain all ownership of its StemCell media processor technologies and patents, and will continue to supply and support its ZMS series of chips to its customers.

Products

The company's products include a range of ARM-based ''ZMS'' processors that feature its so-called ''StemCell'' media processing architecture, plus a portfolio of tablet reference platforms based on its in-house Android

board support package In embedded systems, a board support package (BSP) is the layer of software containing hardware-specific boot loaders, device drivers, in sometimes operating system kernels, and other routines that allow a given embedded operating system, for exa ...

and application software. The most recent platform, the JAGUAR Android reference tablet, was announced in May 2011.

StemCell cores

The core asset of the ZiiLABS ZMS chips seem to be an array of processing units called ''StemCells'' that are programmed to perform media processing. These are described as 32-bit

floating-point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic on subsets of real numbers formed by a ''significand'' (a Sign (mathematics), signed sequence of a fixed number of digits in some Radix, base) multiplied by an integer power of that ba ...

processing units and are likely some form of

digital signal processor A digital signal processor (DSP) is a specialized microprocessor chip, with its architecture optimized for the operational needs of digital signal processing. DSPs are fabricated on metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuit chips. ...

cores used to accelerate various operations. All

video codec A video codec is software or Computer hardware, hardware that data compression, compresses and Uncompressed video, decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, ''codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while ...

and 3D graphics handling in the ZMS processors is handled by programming this array of

coprocessor A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor (the CPU). Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating-point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, cryptography or ...

s to do the job.

Processors

ZMS-40
(quad Cortex-A9 with 96 StemCell cores)
ZMS-20
(dual Cortex A9 with 48 StemCell cores)
ZMS-08
(single Cortex-A8 with 64 StemCell cores) * ZMS-05 (dual ARM9 with 24 StemCell cores)

Reference platforms

* Zii EGG (this product is now end-of-life)
JAGUAR
(Android 3.2 Reference Tablet)
JAGUAR3
(Slim Android 3.2 Reference Tablet) Over the years a number of other development platforms have been made introduced including the Zii Development kits (traditional large form factor systems).

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Ziilabs Electronics companies established in 2009 ARM architecture Creative Technology products Creative Technology Graphics hardware companies Singaporean brands Singaporean companies established in 2009 Intel acquisitions 2012 mergers and acquisitions