NeoMagic's trick was to put memory and graphics on the same piece of silicon. In 1997 laptops were heavy, hot, and short on battery, and every separate chip inside them took space and power. NeoMagic's MagicGraph chips combined a large block of memory with the logic that drew the screen. Notebook makers could build thinner machines that lasted longer. The Santa Clara company went public in March 1997, four years after it was founded, betting laptops were the future of the PC.

A Design Win in Every Notebook

Kamran Elahian and Prakash Agarwal started the company in May 1993. Elahian had co-founded several chip companies before. NeoMagic's chips integrated large DRAM with analog and logic circuits on one die, which was hard to manufacture and hard to copy. The company sold to notebook PC makers. Each new laptop model that chose its chip, a design win, could mean hundreds of thousands of units.

Twelve Dollars and a Fade

NeoMagic sold shares at $12 in March 1997, on Nasdaq under the ticker NMGC. For a few years its chips were inside a large share of the world's laptops. Then bigger rivals caught up, and Intel began building graphics into its own chipsets. NeoMagic left the notebook market and tried chips for phones and handheld devices. Nasdaq delisted the stock in 2008, and the company stopped filing with the SEC in 2013.

Cover: Two Magicians with Two Boys, from Scherzi, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for magicians (NeoMagic).