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 chip technology that was used on many of the world's leading computer graphics cards in the CAD and DCC markets, including its own Wildcat and Oxygen cards.
In 2006, the company focused development efforts on its emerging media processing business, and in 2009 became the Singapore-based ZiiLABS.
History
3Dlabs was formed from a management buy-out of DuPont Pixel Systems in the UK in April 1994 and went public on Nasdaq in October 1996. 3Dlabs acquired Dynamic Pictures in July 1998 and the Intense3D division of Intergraph in July 2000. It was itself acquired by Creative Labs in June 2002. In February 2006, 3Dlabs announced that it would stop developing professional 3D graphics chips and focus on embedded and mobile media processors.
3Dlabs was an early pioneer in bringing 3D graphics to the PC. Its GLINT 300SX graphics processor was the industry's first single chip, 3D-capable graphics device that was shipped on graphics boards from multiple vendors. Gamma was the first single chip graphics geometry processor for the PC. Permedia was the first low-cost OpenGL accelerator chip. 3Dlabs was a member of the OpenGL Architecture Review Board and played an important role in the development of OpenGL 2.0 and ongoing evolution of the OpenGL API.