Odeum has sold more MPEG2/AC3 chips than CUBE?????????????
Electronic ComponentsGraphics ICs and ChipsetsSeptember 1997
asiansources.com
Graphics ICs shift from 2D to 3D
Makers are making the transition as emerging systems require more powerful graphics. In South Korea, DVD technology is boosting the demand for MPEG chips.
<Picture>Market research firm Dataquest Inc. predicts that the worldwide revenues from the sales of graphic controllers for PCs will grow from $1.7 billion in 1997 to $2.9 billion in 2000. Within the same period, worldwide shipments in the market will rise from 105 million units to 164 million units.
As a result, competition among makers of graphics ICs and chipsets will become more intense and buyers will have a dizzying array of suppliers to choose from.
Manufacturers from countries such as the United States, South Korea, Europe and Taiwan are bracing themselves in anticipation of a more competitive market by mass producing innovative models. Most of them are also making the transition from 2D to 3D to meet the requirements of emerging systems.
A new industry standard
There are already more than 30 North American companies developing 3D chips, says Yong Yao, vice president of strategic marketing and planning at Trident Microsystems Inc.
Yao's view is shared by other industry analysts.
"By the end of the year, we'll see very few exclusively 2D solutions," says Andy Fischer, analyst at Jon Peddie Associates, a multimedia consulting firm.
Product mixes are also changing rapidly, with makers offering a complex generation of new models. Emerging graphics chips offer everything from 2D/3D capabilities to TV-receiver, DVD and video support - all designed for the new market standard, Intel's Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP).
Philip Bernosky of S3 Inc. says, "We look at AGP as a good thing for the market. Why? Because it creates a dedicated port to graphics. Now our graphics chips don't have to share a port with completely different devices, such as disk drives, CD-ROM drives or audio cards. Furthermore, AGP provides a much higher bandwidth than its predecessor, the PCI, has provided."
Makers are also expected to introduce graphics chips for desktop and mobile systems simultaneously over the next couple of years. "This will close the gap between the performance of desktop systems and the performance of mobile systems," adds Bernosky.
He says the shrinking size of transistors will make this possible. "We're able to pack more functions onto our chips but still maintain low levels of power consumption, which is a requirement in any solution for mobile systems."
Despite all the changes in the market, makers say they can meet the diverse requirements of their buyers. "We're keeping our inventory very low," Yao reveals. "In fact, our inventory currently is half as large as the inventories of our competitors. As a result, we can respond much more quickly to the transitions in the market and go in whatever direction these transitions dictate."
Bright outlook for 3D chips
Despite a couple of false starts in the past two years, makers such as SGS-Thomson Microelectronics and Philips Semiconductors B.V. are optimistic that the European market for 3D graphics ICs is now starting to take off.
"People are starting to talk about 1997 as the year 3D really starts to grow, and that's really starting to happen now," says Stuart McKechnie, strategic marketing manager of Philips' Multimedia PC Group.
Tim Chambers, director of Graphics Business Unit at SGS-Thomson in France agrees. Chamber says up to 150 million PCs with 3D graphics could be shipped by 2000.
"Video is coming of age in the system, and recently, major OEMs are putting video in as standard, certainly on their consumer PCs. And in some cases as a key option in some of the business PCs," adds McKechnie.
European manufacturers believe they have the right combination of price, performance and features to cope with a fast changing market. More importantly, they believe they currently lead other makers in the video graphic controllers (VGC) field.
Among the VGC models that are forecast to corner a large share of the market for European makers is SGS-Thomson's RIVA 128. It is the first 128bit 3D multimedia accelerator to support Intel's Visual Computing Initiative, providing 3D, 2D, video and imaging capabilities.
The model does not need an audio engine and is equipped with VGA hardware compatible with all VGA modes. It can process up to 5 million triangles per second and deliver more than 100 million rendered pixels per second using a 5GFLOPs floating point setup engine and a massively parallel pixel processor.
RIVA 128 also integrates advanced video-processing technologies that can accelerate emerging multimedia applications such as DVD, Intercast, video phone and TV display. These technologies include scatter-gather DMA; color format conversion, scaling and filtering; and TV flicker filtering, all of which complement the Pentium MMX to provide high-quality digital-video playback.
Other popular European-made models are the SAA9725 2D and SAA9726 3D from Philips Semiconductors' Big Cats family of VGCs. Both PCI-based VGCs provide simultaneous capture, storage and delivery of TV and DVD data for multimedia applications, such as DVD playback, PC entertainment, video capture/editing and videoconferencing.
Investing in technology
Taiwan makers of graphics ICs and chipsets are technologically at par with U.S. manufacturers.
Macronix Int. Co. Ltd, for instance, has R&D centers manned by software engineers in Taiwan and the United States. This enables the company to obtain software standards from Microsoft, says Larry Yu, marketing manager. "In addition, Taiwan engineers are very quick to develop the software, usually about six months to one year," he adds.
Taiwan makers are also financially capable of undertaking costly R&D projects.
Joe Chen of Winbond Electronics Corp. says the cost of developing the software for a graphics driver is about $360,000. "Taiwan IC companies have enough money to invest in these R&D (projects)," he adds.
Moreover, Taiwan's ideal geographical location enables makers to offer services on time to major buyers such as Hong Kong, China and India.
These buyers can choose from a wide range of models offered by Taiwan companies.
Winbond, in particular, boasts of being the sole supplier of the W9971CF video graphics controller with TV Interface. This chip provides graphics acceleration and TV quality full screen motion video acceleration for IBM PCs and other platforms compatible with the chip's architecture. It also integrates the NTSC/PAL TV encoder with S-video or composite video for flicker-free image quality. The chip features an on-chip RAMDAC and dual programmable clock synthesizers with data rates of up to170MHz.
Winbond is also scheduled to introduce a 3D full-motion video graphics controller with a resolution of 1,600 by 1,200 pixels in the first quarter of 1998.
Macronix's latest models are the MX86250 and the MX86251 2D graphics accelerators. The latter functions as a high-performance 3D engine for PC games or CAD applications when used in conjunction with the 3Dfx interactive Voodoo Rush accelerator. It has a clock speed of 85MHz and a 680Mbps peak memory bandwidth.
<Picture>Another innovative product is the SiS6326 accelerator from Silicon Integrated Systems Corp. (SiS).
The SiS6326 is a PCI true-color graphics accelerator with video accelerator functions. It features a peak rate of 800,000 polygons per second, complete TV-out and VGA-out solutions and an MPEG-1/2 video decoder.
Price reductions likely
Taiwan-made 2D graphics ICs and chipsets for low-end applications are the cheapest in the world. Still, most makers forecast a decline of as much as 20 percent in the prices of Taiwan-made 2D and 3D graphics ICs and chipsets.
The use of 0.35æm technology enables makers to cut on production costs and lower their quotes to compete with U.S. manufacturers.
According to SiS Vice President Ken Huang, the high demand for 2D and 3D chips is expected to last for two more years and Taiwan makers are taking advantage of this opportunity to grab a share of the market by lowering their prices.
DVD boosts MPEG demand
Makers in South Korea have started to mass produce innovative MPEG models to cope with the rising demand brought about by the emergence of the DVD technology.
LG Semicon Co. Ltd developed the MPACT/3000 last year in collaboration with Toshiba. The chip supports the MPEG real-time encoder, the MPEG-1/2 and the video disk player decoder. It is capable of processing 2D and 3D graphics with a resolution of 1,280 by 1,024 pixels. Among the other functions it supports are speakerphone/caller ID features, FAX/modem transmissions of up to 33.6Kbps, SVD/DSVD, Dolby AC-3 audio, SRS 3D audio, 3D graphics for Windows 95, and standard videoconferencing protocols such as the H.320 (ISDN), H.323 (LAN) and H.324 (POTS).
LG Semicon is also involved in a joint project with LG Electronics Inc. to develop a new MPEG chip with DSP functions. This chip is scheduled for mass production at the end of the year.
Hyundai Electronics Co. Ltd, on the other hand, started mass production of the ODM8111P MPEG-2 decoder chip for DVD systems last June. The chip supports Dolby AC-3 interfacing and features graphics overlay capabilities, on-chip PLL, ISA/Intel/Motorola bus interface support, pan and scan letterboxing for 16:9 video on a 4:3 screen, programmable positioning and zooming of graphics, and an 8bit digital YUV video output. It is fully compliant with ISO MPEG-2 bit streams and specifications and is capable of demultiplexing compressed data and audio streams. Full resolution is 720 by 480 at 30fps (NTSC) and 720 by 576 at 25fps (PAL). The ODM8111P is marketed under the brand name ODEUM.
Focus is on exports
Hyundai Electronics' largest export market is the United States.
"I know Korea is a forerunner in the DVD world market, and our technology development is rather faster than that of America. So we have more advantages in the exports of MPEG chips," says Marketing Manager Hyun-Seong Cho. Cho adds that there are only two makers of MPEG chips that support Dolby AC-3 functions, Hyundai and C-Cube. Of the two, Hyundai has the larger market share because it started mass production earlier.
Sales in the American markets are handled by ODEUM Microsystems Inc., a sister company of Hyundai based in the United States. Orders from Asian markets such as the Philippines, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Indonesia are handled by Hyundai Electronics itself. |
