Silicon Image
More info
- Released
- 1995–2015
- Owner
- Lattice Semiconductor (since 2015)
- Type
- Chip company (display links)
The chip company whose signalling sits underneath DVI and HDMI, and which therefore made money on almost every flat-screen TV.
Silicon Image was founded in Sunnyvale in 1995 around PanelLink, a way of pushing uncompressed digital video down a cable using TMDS signalling. PanelLink became the basis of DVI in 1999, and when consumer electronics wanted the same thing plus audio and copy protection, Silicon Image was one of the founders of HDMI in 2002, alongside Sony, Toshiba, Philips and others.
It also ran HDMI licensing through a subsidiary and developed MHL, which squeezed an HDMI signal out of a phone's micro-USB port. Lattice Semiconductor bought the company in 2015. Rival DisplayPort took an entirely different route — packet-based and royalty-free — which has not been enough to evict HDMI from the living room.