Oak Technology
| Company type | Public |
|---|---|
| Industry | Semiconductor |
| Founded | 1987 |
| Founder | David Tsang |
| Defunct | 2003 |
| Fate | Acquired by Zoran Corporation |
| Headquarters | Sunnyvale, California , United States |
Area served | United States, Asia Pacific |
Key people | David Tsang (founder and CEO) |
| Products | Integrated circuits for sound cards, graphics cards, optical storage devices (CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD drives), PC graphics chipsets, motherboard chipsets |
| Parent | Zoran Corporation (from 2003) |
Oak Technology (OAKT) was a United States-based semiconductor manufacturer specializing in integrated circuits for sound cards, graphics cards, and optical storage devices including CD-ROM, CD-RW, and DVD drives. The company experienced notable revenue expansion and stock value increases during the 2000 technology bubble, largely due to its strong foothold in optical storage chipsets. Nevertheless, after encountering financial difficulties, Oak Technology was purchased by Zoran Corporation in 2003.
Oak Technology played a role in shaping the ATAPI standard and was responsible for the popular oakcdrom.sys CD-ROM driver widely used in DOS environments throughout the mid-1990s.
History
Established in 1987 by semiconductor industry veteran David Tsang, Oak Technology was based in Sunnyvale, California with operational facilities across the United States and Asia Pacific regions. The company initially focused on supplying PC graphics (SVGA) chipsets, CD-ROM controller ICs, and printed circuit boards. Its product range also included motherboard chipsets such as a PS/2-compatible chipset and the Oaknote chipset designed for notebook computers, primarily targeting the budget-conscious segment of the market.
In 1994, Sun Microsystems changed the name of their programming language from Oak to Java after discovering that Oak Technology held the trademark rights for "Oak."
Initial Public Offering (IPO)
By 1995, Oak Technology had secured a leading position in semiconductor components for CD-ROM drives. Its broad portfolio spanning PC graphics and optical storage contributed to a successful initial public offering followed by a secondary stock sale. The company regained market momentum with the transition to recordable and rewritable optical media technologies, which propelled significant revenue increases and stock appreciation during the height of the tech bubble.
Despite earlier achievements, Oak Technology’s financial results deteriorated sharply, culminating in a stock price decline exceeding 50% on June 19, 2002. Toward the end of 2002, Oak expanded its product lineup by acquiring digital television chip innovator Teralogic for $38 million. This strategic move enhanced its offerings and later supported Zoran’s digital TV chipset development after Oak’s acquisition in 2003.
Graphics products
During the mid-1990s, Oak’s graphics division transitioned from producing 2D solutions to developing advanced 3D graphics technology aimed at delivering high-performance products for personal computers and gaming applications. In 1996, Oak introduced the Warp 5 graphics controller, which supported Microsoft’s "Direct3D" and "ActiveMovie" standards—an initiative designed to capitalize on growing multimedia demand.
Warp 5 - OTI 64317 The Warp 5 represented Oak’s sole 2D/3D graphics accelerator chip and featured a tile-based deferred rendering (TBDR) architecture comparable to PowerVR technology but distinguished itself by integrating tiling with sophisticated rendering capabilities such as anti-aliasing and trilinear mipmapping. It maintained pin compatibility with its predecessor 2D chipsets to ease integration into existing hardware designs.
Ahead of its era technologically, Warp 5 incorporated on-chip z-sorting alongside spatial anti-aliasing techniques enabling advanced features including 24-bit floating point Z-buffering, sub-pixel anti-aliasing, order-independent translucency effects, nonlinear fogging, atmospheric rendering effects, and MIP-Mapping. Unlike typical region-based architectures constrained by polygon limits per region, Oak asserted that Warp 5 imposed no such polygon count restrictions.
Notable specifications comprised:
- Pixel processing capability of up to 50 million pixels per second with all features active
- Support for EDO and SGRAM memory modules up to 8 MB capacity
- Integrated texture cache on-chip
- Acceleration for 2D graphical user interfaces
- Vertical video scaling functionality plus VBI support including Intercast services
- RAMDAC operating at 220 MHz
- Maximum display resolution reaching 1600 × 1200 pixels
- Compatibility with Direct3D and BRender application programming interfaces
- Support for Windows 95 and Windows NT operating systems
- Packaged within a 256-pin Ball Grid Array (BGA)
- Pin compatibility with OAK OTI-74217 EON 2D GUI accelerator chip
This product marked a pivotal advancement in Oak Technology’s strategy to broaden its presence within the competitive graphics market by leveraging cutting-edge innovations tailored to meet the demands of multimedia and gaming industries.
List of Graphics Products
OTI037C - An 8-bit VGA chipset equipped with up to 256KB of DRAM, compatible with VGA, EGA, and CGA display standards. It generally supports standard VGA resolutions, including 320×200×256 and 640×480×16 modes.
OTI057/067 - An ISA SVGA chipset capable of handling up to 512KB of DRAM, typically utilizing 70/80 ns memory.
OTI077 - An upgraded iteration of the OTI067 featuring support for 1MB memory and a dot clock reaching 65 MHz. It accommodates display resolutions as high as 1024×768×256 in non-interlaced mode and 1280×1024×16 interlaced.
OTI087 - This ISA SVGA chipset was among the earliest to support the VLB architecture. It boasts a 16-bit external data bus, a 32-bit internal memory controller, an enhanced local-bus host interface with read/write caching capabilities, and features such as register-based color expansion and color fill. The maximum BIOS-supported resolutions are 1024x768x256 non-interlaced and 1280×1024×256 interlaced, operating at an 80 MHz dot clock (commonly paired with the OTI068 clock generator running at 78 MHz). Memory support extends up to 2MB of 70/70R ns DRAM.
A variant named OTI087X introduced a hardware mouse cursor sprite and was frequently integrated into Weitek P9000 boards as an auxiliary VGA controller; nevertheless, its limited 8-bit data bus constrained performance in VGA modes.
Spitfire - OTI 64105/64107 - These chipsets support PCI, VLB, and ISA interfaces, offering 64-bit DRAM compatibility along with 2D/GUI acceleration on par with contemporary solutions.
Spitfire - OTI 64111 - An enhanced model featuring a built-in 135 MHz RAMDAC with support for both DRAM and EDO memory types.
Eon - OTI 64217 - A PCI chipset designed to accommodate EDO DRAM and SGRAM technologies.
Warp 5 - OTI 64317 - This PCI chipset integrates both 2D and 3D acceleration capabilities, supports EDO DRAM and SGRAM, delivers resolutions up to 1600x1200, and includes Direct3D acceleration; it is pin-compatible with the OTI64217.
Optical Storage Products
Oak made a significant impact upon entering the CD-ROM controller sector. By the year 1994, it had shipped millions of chipsets for CD-ROM, CD-R/RW, DVD-ROM, and combo drives, primarily targeting personal computers. With the widespread adoption of the IDE interface and the rise of plug-and-play CD-ROM drives, Oak collaborated with a Korean semiconductor foundry to satisfy increasing market demands. In October 1994, Oak introduced the OTI-201, marking the industry's first MPEG-based controller capable of sound and video compression/decompression for multimedia PCs. This innovation enabled manufacturers to offer high-performance MPEG graphics and video on a single expansion card, thereby broadening Oak’s product range beyond traditional controllers.
CEO Tsang regarded the OTI-201 launch as a pivotal strategic initiative aimed at diversifying revenue streams amid projections that CD-ROM controller technology would become commoditized. Building on Oak’s proficiency in graphics chipsets and connectivity solutions, Tsang envisioned developing successive generations of PC video display controllers along with chips for emerging markets such as 3D graphics acceleration, recordable CDs, TV set-top boxes, CD Video players, as well as PC-based video production and teleconferencing equipment. By January 1995, Oak had evolved from a “behind-the-scenes supplier” into the foremost global supplier of CD-ROM controller chips, with this product line accounting for the majority of its revenue. The rapid acceleration in CD-ROM drive speeds during 1995 propelled sales to triple those recorded in 1993, underscoring Oak’s dominant market presence and robust business expansion.