DisplayLink

DisplayLink was founded in 2003 as Newnham Research by Dr. Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Martin King. The Newnham Research team invented NIVO (Network In, Video Out) designed for low-cost thin-client computing over Ethernet networks. The company referred to these thin-client computers as network displays.

In 2006, Newnham Research launched its first commercially available product in partnership with the Kensington Computer Products Group: a USB 2.0 universal laptop docking station designed for the retail market.

In November 2006, Newnham Research renamed itself to DisplayLink, a name that allegedly better described its display connection technology. The name is very similar to the DisplayPort display interface, which was approved by VESA earlier that year.

DisplayLink launched its first semiconductor product family, the DL-120 and DL-160 USB 2.0 graphics devices, in January 2007, signaling a change in the company's business plan from FPGA-based systems to semiconductors. The DL-120 and DL-160 allow up to six additional monitors to be added to a PC through USB 2.0.

In May 2009, DisplayLink launched its second semiconductor product family, the DL-125, DL-165, and DL-195 USB 2.0 graphics devices. This DL-1x5 family brought improved performance, an increase in maximum resolution to 2048x1152, and the integration of a DVI transmitter and video DAC. The first products to ship with the new DL-1x5 chips were the Samsung Lapfit LD190G and LD220G monitors.

On November 17, 2009, DisplayLink announced its first Thin Client product based on its USB 2.0 virtual graphics technology, designed for Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server. Thin client manufacturer HP was the first to announce a product based on DisplayLink USB Graphics technology with the launch of the t100 Thin Client.

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 2012, DisplayLink announced several products incorporating video and graphics over a USB 3.0 "SuperSpeed USB" connection, showing substantial improvements in performance, resolution support, and video quality.

At CES in 2013, DisplayLink demonstrated USB Power Delivery in which a standard USB cable is used to charge a laptop computer.

DisplayLink's network graphics technology consists of two main components:

Virtual Graphics Card (VGC) software that is installed on a PC and;

a Hardware Rendering Engine (HRE) embedded in or connected to a display device.

The DisplayLink VGC software is based on proprietary adaptive graphics technology. The VGC software runs on a Windows, macOS, or Linux host PC and takes information from the graphics adapter, compresses the changes to the display from the last update, and sends it over any standard network including USB, Wireless USB, Ethernet, and Wi-Fi.

Criticism

An independent review published in 2011 determined that at the time, DisplayLink use led to significantly higher CPU utilization compared to displays connected by native video interfaces.

Summer 2012 Mac OS X 10.8 problems were addressed by a new DisplayLink Mac driver announced at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show. An article on DisplayLink's website said that minor issues under Mavericks (October 2013) and Yosemite (October 2014) were being resolved in collaboration with Apple.

Customers have also complained that DisplayLink USB3 video-certified technologies have falsely advertised support for Linux, or not stated that it is OS-dependent when running the Displaylink 3xxx/41xx chipset.

DisplayLink finally responded to this in August 2015 by releasing a binary driver for Ubuntu that supports all current USB 3.0 ICs. It is unclear if other Linux distributions will have DisplayLink support; however, details on how to port the driver to other distributions have been provided on the DisplayLink website.