Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS; ) is a company that manufactures, among other things, motherboard chipsets. The company was founded in 1987 in

Hsinchu Science Park The Hsinchu Science Park (HSP; ) is an industrial park complex that originated as one campus straddled Hsinchu City, Hsinchu County, Chunan and Tongluo, later expanded to cover six campuses across Taiwan. It was established by the government of ...

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...

Business

In the late 1990s, SiS made the decision to invest in their own chip

fabrication Fabrication may refer to: * Manufacturing, specifically the crafting of individual parts as a solo product or as part of a larger combined product. Processes in arts, crafts and manufacturing *Semiconductor device fabrication, the process used t ...

facilities. At the end of 1999, SiS acquired Rise Technology and its mP6 x86 core technology.Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) acquired Hycon Technology on January 1, 2025. The acquisition involved SiS issuing 0.8713 shares for every Hycon share, totaling 27,755,080 shares.

Mainboard chipsets

One of the most famous chipsets produced by SiS was the late 486-age chipset 496/497 which supported

PCI PCI may refer to: Business and economics * Payment card industry, businesses associated with debit, credit, and other payment cards ** Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, a set of security requirements for credit card processors * Prov ...

bus among older ISA- and VLB-buses. Mainboards using this chipset and equipped with CPUs such as the Intel 80486DX4, AMD 5x86 or

Cyrix Cx5x86 The Cyrix 5x86 is a line of x86 microprocessors designed by Cyrix and released on June 5 of 1995. Cyrix, being a fabless company, had the chips manufactured by IBM. The line came out about 5 months before the more famous Cyrix 6x86. The Cyrix ...

processors had performance and compatibility comparable with early Intel

Pentium Pentium is a series of x86 architecture-compatible microprocessors produced by Intel from 1993 to 2023. The Pentium (original), original Pentium was Intel's fifth generation processor, succeeding the i486; Pentium was Intel's flagship proce ...

systems in addition to a lower price. ROCKY-518HV - SiS5598-2376

After this late success, SiS continued positioning itself as a budget chipset producer. The company emphasized high integration to minimize the cost to implement their solutions. As such, SiS one-chip mainboard chipsets that included integrated video, such as the

Socket 7 Socket 7 is a physical and electrical specification for an x86-style CPU socket on a personal computer motherboard. It was released in June 1995. The socket supersedes the earlier Socket 5, and accepts P5 Pentium microprocessors manufactured by ...

-based SiS 5596, SiS 5598, and SiS 530 along with the

Slot 1 Slot 1 refers to the physical and electrical specification for the connector used by some of Intel's microprocessors, including the Pentium Pro, Celeron, Pentium II and the Pentium III. Both single and dual processor configurations were impl ...

-based SiS 620. These were some of the first PC chipsets with such high integration. They allowed entire system solutions to be built with just a mainboard, system RAM, and a CPU.

386 & 486 (Socket 1, 2, 3)

* SiS 310,320,330 "Rabbit" * SiS 401/402 ISA * SiS 406/411 EISA, Vesa Local Bus * SiS 460 ISA, Vesa Local Bus * SiS 461 ISA, Vesa Local Bus * SiS 471 ISA, Vesa Local Bus * SiS 496/497 ISA, VLB, PCI

Pentium (Socket 4,5,7)

*SiS 501/502/503 ISA, PCI *SiS 5511/5512/5513 ISA, PCI *SiS 5571 ISA, PCI *SiS 5581 ISA, PCI *SiS 5582 ISA, PCI *SiS 5591/5595 ISA, PCI, AGP The SiS 530 (Sindbad) with SiS 5595 southbridge supported

SDRAM Synchronous dynamic random-access memory (synchronous dynamic RAM or SDRAM) is any DRAM where the operation of its external pin interface is coordinated by an externally supplied clock signal. DRAM integrated circuits (ICs) produced from the ...

1.5 GB max., a bus frequency from 66 MHz to 124 MHz, and can have from 2 to 8

MiB The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

shared memory for an integrated AGP SiS 6306 2D/3D graphics controller. Includes integrated UDMA66 IDE controller. mainboards using the SiS 530 were positioned as cheap office platforms and paired often with low-cost chips from

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

competitors, such as the

AMD K6 The K6 microprocessor was launched by AMD in 1997. The main advantage of this particular microprocessor is that it was designed to fit into existing desktop designs for Pentium-branded CPUs. It was marketed as a product that could perform as wel ...

series or

Cyrix 6x86 The Cyrix 6x86 is a line of sixth-generation, 32-bit x86 microprocessors designed and released by Cyrix in 1995. Cyrix, being a fabless company, had the chips manufactured by IBM and SGS-Thomson. The 6x86 was made as a direct competitor to Intel ...

. The graphics controller had

Direct3D Direct3D is a graphics application programming interface (API) for Microsoft Windows. Part of DirectX, Direct3D is used to render three-dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games. Direct3D uses hardware ...

6.0 and

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a Language-independent specification, cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D computer graphics, 2D and 3D computer graphics, 3D vector graphics. The API is typic ...

support, although it was a very low-performance product for 3D acceleration. SiS 540 (Spartan) integrates SiS 300 graphics controller.

Socket 370, Slot 1

* SiS 600/SiS 5595 * SiS 620/SiS 5595 * SiS 630 - includes North- and South bridges (SiS 960) and 2D/3D graphics controller (SiS 305) on one chip * SiS 633 * SiS 635

Socket 478, Socket 775

SiS and ALi were the only two companies initially awarded licenses to produce third party chipsets for the

Pentium 4 Pentium 4 is a series of single-core central processing unit, CPUs for Desktop computer, desktops, laptops and entry-level Server (computing), servers manufactured by Intel. The processors were shipped from November 20, 2000 until August 8, 20 ...

. SiS developed the 648 chipset with this license (SiS 648 B Stepping supports Intel Hyper-Threading CPU on some motherboards like MSI 648 Max).

Socket A (Socket 462), Slot A

Socket 940, 754, 939, AM2

Memory support is dependent on the CPU SiS created a multimedia chipset for the

Xbox 360 The Xbox 360 is a home video game console developed by Microsoft. As the successor to the Xbox (console), original Xbox, it is the second console in the Xbox#Consoles, Xbox series. It was officially unveiled on MTV on May 12, 2005, with detail ...

Southbridge chips

Paired with later SiS chipsets, such as the 661GX/761GX, which adopt a standard two-chip chipset design (instead of single-chip, like the older SiS 630/730 series chipsets). SiS southbridges can handle IDE, LAN (accompanied by a

PHY In the seven-layer OSI model of computer networking, the physical layer or layer 1 is the first and lowest layer: the layer most closely associated with the physical connection between devices. The physical layer provides an electrical, mechani ...

chip), audio (with an AC'97 codec), along with other types of I/O. SiS' proprietary MuTIOL interconnect connects the southbridge chip to the northbridge, which contains the RAM controller (for chipsets targeted at Intel platforms) and interfaces with the CPU.

Graphics chipsets

Discrete 3D Graphics chips

Integrated 3D Graphics

* ¹

Pixel shader In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene—a process known as '' shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of s ...

vertex shader In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene—a process known as '' shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of s ...

texture mapping unit In computer graphics, a texture mapping unit (TMU) is a component in modern graphics processing units (GPUs). They are able to rotate, resize, and distort a bitmap image to be placed onto an arbitrary plane of a given 3D model as a texture, in ...

render output unit In computer graphics, the render output unit or raster operations pipeline (ROP) is a hardware component in modern graphics processing units (GPUs) and one of the final steps in the rendering process of modern graphics cards. The pixel pipeline ...

s Some cards contain a 3D graphics accelerator but it is only functional with the SiS's Proprietary Windows-only driver (the company does not provide documentation for others to write drivers). However, the Linux kernel includes a working third party driver that, while not supporting 3D gaming, makes the cards usable under Linux.

Touch-Screen chipsets

References

External links

* {{Electronics industry in Taiwan 1987 establishments in Taiwan Computer companies of Taiwan Computer hardware companies Manufacturing companies based in Hsinchu Electronics companies established in 1987 Electronics companies of Taiwan Graphics hardware companies Semiconductor companies of Taiwan Taiwanese brands