DOS Days

Tamarack Microelectronics Inc.

Tamarack Microelectronics, Inc., (TMI) was a designer and manufacturer of mixed-signal integrated circuits, primarily Ethernet communications devices. It was founded in 1987 in Hsichih, Taipei, and in 1989 they rebranded themselves to be Tamarack Technologies, Inc. (TTI), as they moved into the world of telecommunications technology, including pagers. In 1991 they expanded into the development and manufacturing of  professional scanners. Their headquarters were at 17, Industrial East Road II Science Based Industrial Park, Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C. They also opened European offices at Tamarack Europe B.V., Kamerlingh Onnesweg 6, 4131 PK Vianen, The Netherlands, and also in USA at Tamarack Technologies, Inc., 1521 Orangewood Ave., Orange, CA 92868 U.S.A.

In August 2002 TTI merged with IC Plus Corp. Their website used to be at http://www.tamarack.com.tw.

They produced an XT chipset called the "Super XT" (TD3300A).

To my knowledge they only produced a single display controller chip, the TD3088A. Other chips from Tamarack had the designation TC#####, where the 'C' denoted 'communication' - these were Ethernet controller chips, and included the TC3001, TC3092, TC3097, TC3196 and TC3299.

 

TD3088A

Launched: 1987
Bus: 8-bit ISA

The TD3088A was a Hercules- and MDA-standard controller chip, sold to numerous PC display card manufacturers for use on their own cards.

The chip *may* have been sold and rebranded to Winbond as the W66855AF - both are 100-pin display controller chips and the pin designations look to be similar.

The TD3088A monochrome display controller chip was found on:

  • Kouwell KW-526K - an 8-bit Hercules-compatible graphics card
  • MGP-34
  • 3088D

The pics here are courtesy of Andrew Welburn of Andy's Arcade.

More Images

TD3300A

Launched: 1989(?)
Bus: 8-bit ISA

The TD3300A was Tamarack's only foray into the chipset market. It was designed for XT-compatible motherboards, supporting the Intel 8088 and NEC V20 processors up to 15 MHz with zero wait states. Unlike other [usally later] XT chipsets, the TD3300A still required other supporting ICs, including an 8253 Programmable Interval Timer, 8259 Interrupt Controller, and 8237 DMA Controller.

The chipset could also support up to 1 MB of RAM, with 640 KB of conventional memory + 384 KB for a RAM disk, print spooler, or hard disk cache. It could be populated with 41464, 414256 or 411000 DRAM ICs.

The TD3300A was also fabricated by NEC and VDL, so some of these chipsets have NEC or VDL branding.

According to Vintage Computer Forums member Xacalite, "Access to the extra 384KB is via I/O ports, so no EMS page frame in the Upper Memory Area. EMS is still possible, EMS driver does exist (I reckon it was written by one of the users of this forum), but it needs to steal 64KB from conventional memory for EMS page frame."

The Juko ST drivers and utilities can be downloaded here.

The TD3300A is known to have been used on:

  • Juko ST / Juko Super Turbo
  • Unique UX Turbo
  • Unique UX-12