| Type | Subsidiary, Creative Technology |
|---|---|
| Founded | January, 2009 (see footnote) |
| Headquarters | Jurong East, Singapore |
| Products | IT, Consumer electronics, ARM processor, System on a chip models: ZMS-08, ZMS-20 and ZMS-40 |
| Parent | Creative Technology |
| Website | www.ziilabs.com |
| References: Formed when 3DLabs and Creative's Personal Digital Entertainment division merged in January 2009. | |
ZiiLABS is a global technology company, whose ZMS media-rich application processors, reference platforms and enabling software are designed to enable OEMs and ODMs to create products that target a range of low-power consumer electronics and embedded markets, including Android based tablets.
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ZiiLABS was originally founded in 1994 as 3DLABS and 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 media-rich applications 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’ flexible Stemcell Computing Array with ARM cores and integrated peripheral functions to create a System-on-a-Chip (SoC).
As 3DLABS the company developed the GLINT and PERMEDIA GPU's used in both personal and workstation graphics cards. In 2002 the company acquired the Intense3D group to become a verticaly 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.
The company's products include a range of ARM-based low-energy ZMS processors that feature its proprietary StemCell media processing architecture, plus a portfolio of tablet reference platforms based on its in-house Android BSP and application software. The most recent platform, the JAGUAR Android reference tablet, was announced in May 2011.
Over the years a number of other development platforms have been made introduced including the Zii Development kits (traditional large form factor systems) and the ZMS-05 based ZiiEGG (now EOL).
The ZMS processors use a flexible and programmable array of floating point processing elements to perform all the media acceleration tasks required of modern SoCs, including 1080p H.264 encode and decode, image processing, 2D graphics and OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics. Developers can leverage the parallel architecture and performance of the array via the industry standard OpenCL API.