Silicon Image Inc.

Silicon Image is an American semiconductor design company. The company manufactures a variety of integrated circuits commonly used in modern computers and consumer electronic devices, but is focused on storage, distribution and presentation of high-definition content in the consumer electronics, personal computing, and mobile device markets. The company was founded in 1995, and is traded on the NASDAQ market under the symbol SIMG. The company, which employs around 600 people, is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

Simplay Labs, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Silicon Image, offers testing tools, technologies, support services, consulting and product certification to electronics manufacturers to increase performance, interoperability and ensure quality.

The company's products include high-speed communications devices for use in DVI capable displays and PCs, HDMI set-top boxes, DVD players, AV receivers, displays, PCs and mobile devices; and SATA chipsets for internal and external hard disk drives.

Product alerts

Silicon Image SiI3112 Serial ATA controller chips have a quirk which can cause problems with certain hard drives. When writes of larger than 8KB in size are sent to the drive, the controller may send Serial ATA Data FISes which are not split on a 512-byte boundary. This behavior is allowed by the Serial ATA specification, however some older Seagate drives cannot deal with this and lock up when receiving such frames. The workaround when using the affected drives with these controllers requires limiting writes to the disk to 15 sectors at a time, which has a performance impact.

Silicon Image SiI3114 and SiI3512 have another issue that shows up when writing blocks of more than 8KB to the drive. Under some timing conditions, the controller may incorrectly send an R_ERR response to the drive in response to a DMA Activate FIS. This can be prevented by a controller configuration change made by the driver. ^[1]

Milestones

• September 2009: Silicon Image Joins Mobile High-Definition Interface Working Group

• July 2009: 3D ^{[disambiguation needed]} Product Portfolio Announced

• June 2009: HDMI Specification Version 1.4 Released

• May 2009: Silicon Image Joins Serial Port Memory Technology (SPMT™) Consortium

• April 2008: Silicon Image Joins Working Group to Drive New Memory Interface Standard

• March 2008: The number of firms adopting the HDMI standard surpasses 800

• June 2007: Silicon Image shipped its 1 millionth DTV Input Processor

• December 2006: HDMI Adopters Reach 500th milestone

• February 2005: Silicon Image ships 100 millionth chip

• October 1999: Silicon Image raises $46.8 million in Initial Public Offering

See also

• CMD640
• HDfury
• LiquidHD

References

1. ^ "sata_sil: clean up and add errata/workaround documentation - gmane.org". http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ide/8253.  (workaround description)

External links

• Silicon Image
• Simplay Labs

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