Europe.....................................................
nikkeibp.com
Alfred Vollmer, Munich
Asia-Pacific to Play Multimedia Developer Role
"The Asia-Pacific is in a transition phase from being a mass production area to playing an important role on the multimedia development side," said Rainer Hoffmann, marketing manager multimedia at the German semiconductor manufacturer Intermetall GmbH. In order to satisfy this demand, Intermetall is investing in the Asia-Pacific by opening new offices and sending application engineers from their central labs in Germany to the Asia-Pacific.
"Today we have a very strong interaction between our US application lab and our customers in the Asia-Pacific area, as many of the reference designs that we do are in cooperation with US companies like NVidia, Trident or Rendition 3D Labs to name just a few," Hoffmann added.
"Regarding design activities, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea are trying to catch up with the US," said Paul Bromley, director of SGS-Thomson Microelectronics' (ST) PC strategic unit. "The US is still leading, however, with many Asia-Pacific companies having design centers in the US."
Hans Schwendner, executive director and general manager of Siemens AG's Semiconductors' Image and Video Department, observes a global multimedia convergence covering the entire application spectrum from television (TV), video cassette recorders (VCR) and set-top boxes to PCs, videophones and car navigation.
"A supplier of multimedia chips must have the relevant system know-how, flexibility and component prices to allow his customers to meet their time to market with the system cost the market allows," says Schwendner.
In terms of terrestrial digital video broadcasting (DVB-T), Uwe Binnenbruck, director business development at Siemens Semiconductors, sees a similar tendency: "Normally, design-ins for DVB-T are made in Japan while production is in the Asia-Pacific or Europe. However, we also have a Japanese lead customer whose design-ins as well as the production are both in the Asia-Pacific."
As there are already DVB services via satellite available in the Asia-Pacific, this is an important market for satellite digital video broadcasting (DVB-S). According to Bruno Graf, manager at Motorola Semiconductors' New Media Marketing in Europe, the presence of the DVB committee in Geneva, Switzerland means that Central Europe is a center of competence for this application area.
"Being an American company Motorola designs several DVB-compliant devices for digital set-top boxes in Munich, Germany," says Graf. "The majority of manufacturers of digital set-top boxes from the Asia-Pacific have already opened R&D centers in Europe to be close to the DVB standardization committee."
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Philip's Trimedia Processor in a Kiosk
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Chip Design in A-P
European semiconductor companies are also designing multimedia chips in the Asia-Pacific. For example, ST designed its Omega family (STI55xx) for set-top boxes in Singapore. These family members combine MPEG audio and video with transport functions on a single chip.
The monitor and personal digital assistant (PDA) chipsets of Philips Semiconductors are designed in the Asia-Pacific as well and according to Walter Conrads, director international marketing and sales at Philips Semiconductors, "Philips is extending its chip design activities in the Asia-Pacific."
One focus area for Siemens Semiconductors is Web TV. For this application Siemens currently offers a 16-bit two-chip solution that is capable of displaying Chinese characters as well. A single-chip solution manufactured using the 256-Mbit DRAM technology will be available at significantly lower prices in 1998. These Web TV chips are designed in Singapore.
"Our Web TV solution will enable add-ons for TVs at a retail price of around US$70-80," claims Schwendner. "Ease of access is key for the success of Web TV."
In the entire multimedia range Schwendner sees a new scenario: "More and more functionality is handled by software and less by hardware. This means we need scalability in the controller area."
Conrads of Philips observes the same trend: "The required flexibility to bring new products to the market quickly drives the need for programmable devices. Traditionally a function was highly integrated and then manufactured at a very attractive price. This system does not work any longer. You need to react to market needs very quickly which means that not only digital but also programmable devices are an absolute must."
On the other hand, Paul Bromley from ST sees a slightly different tendency in the multimedia business: "Meeting the right price-performance point is the key challenge for multimedia silicon system vendors. Especially in the multimedia PC business, companies like to design their own ICs but generally they buy the chips. With these short life cycles the PC companies are fading away from a vendor/buyer relationship and some of them design their own chip which is then manufactured by a foundry. The key solution for semiconductor companies are systems on a chip where software customizes the design."
A typical example for such a system on a chip is ST's single-chip PC STPC - a 486 core which has a PCIbus interface as well as a direct bus with a width of 64 bit to connect to graphics or D/A converters.
In terms of applications both Siemens and Philips see a strong demand for videoconferencing and video telephony chips in the Asia-Pacific. Conrads of Philips sees videoconferencing as one of the first and fastest growing multimedia applications in Asia-Pacific.
"This is not a real surprise if you consider that this is one of the areas where the three multimedia basics come together to be used in one application. Most of the video-conferencing design-ins for our Trimedia processor were achieved in Asia-Pacific - mainly in China," he said.
Philips Semiconductors' Trimedia processor performs up to four billion operations per second and offers a synchronous dynamic random access memory (SDRAM) interface capable of running data transfer rates of up to 400 Mbytes/s. |
