Tseng Labs

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Tseng Laboratories, Inc. (also known as Tseng Labs or TLI) was a maker of graphics chips and controllers for IBM PC compatibles, based in Newtown, Pennsylvania, and founded by Jack Tseng. They were active from the early 1980s to their exit from the graphics business in 1997.

Tseng's best-known products were the Tseng Labs ET3000, Tseng Labs ET4000 and Tseng Labs ET6000 VGA-compatible graphics chips, which were highly popular between 1990 and 1995 (the era of Windows 3.x). The company's ET4000 family was noteworthy for unusually fast host-interface (ISA) throughput, despite a conventional DRAM framebuffer.

Tseng was a victim of the graphics card shakeout of the mid-1990s, losing market share to S3 Graphics and ATI Technologies. Tseng was especially late to integrate a RAMDAC into its product-line, not succeeding until the ET6000. In the later years of the ET4000's lifetime, the lack of an integrated RAMDAC severely hurt Tseng's competitiveness.

Struggling to source adequate supplies of memory for their updated cards, and lacking the funds to complete development of a modern integrated 3D engine (the ET6300), the board decided to abandon plans to ship a next generation part, and chose instead to preserve the cash pile, and seek a buy out instead.

This strategy eventually resulted in the company’s engineers and graphics expertise being purchased by ATI (now AMD) in December of 1997. Tseng's management chose to use the proceeds of the sale, along with the existing cash reserves, to invest in a start-up, and merged the company with pharmaceutical company Cell Pathways in 1998.