No where to go but up
11/06/99 - Notebook graphics a winner, NeoMagic looks to diversify
Nov. 05, 1999 (Electronic Engineering Times - CMP via COMTEX) -- PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. - NeoMagic Corp., the only company thus far to successfully
integrate DRAM and logic in a volume product, has its sights set on new markets, including DVD controllers, video cameras and Web phones.
President and chief executive officer Prakash Agarwal outlined NeoMagic's strategy in an interview at the Dataquest Semiconductors '99 conference.
Following NeoMagic's stunning success in the notebook graphics market, many expected the company to march into the desktop graphics sector. But
desktops didn't leverage NeoMagic's ability to reduce power consumption by combining DRAM and graphics processing logic, using a DRAM process.
Instead, NeoMagic looked to other high-volume markets where multimedia and mobility converged, and found several.
Starting in the first quarter of 2000, NeoMagic expects to begin sampling an integrated DVD controller with read channel and control capabilities, including, of
course, embedded DRAM.
Early this year, NeoMagic acquired the optical-drive development group from Mitel Semiconductor (Manchester, England). NeoMagic added 16 engineers
with mixed-signal design capabilities to its staff, and a DVD optical-storage read-channel product line that was merged into NeoMagic's own DVD drive
electronics efforts already under way.
The DVD market is wide, with products spanning the computer, video and audio realms. Agarwal said NeoMagic's video compression techniques might come
to play in a future NeoMagic solution for recordable DVDs.
"We expect to introduce new products in the DVD market. . . . The DVD market will be quite fragmented, and we are investing for the long term. It takes about
three to five years to develop a completely new product line, and that is what we have been working on," Agarwal said.
After DVD, NeoMagic will tackle digital video cameras. Again, a strategic acquisition combined with NeoMagic's own technology strengths may provide a lift.
In February, NeoMagic acquired array processing specialist ACL Corp. (Tel Aviv, Israel). ACL's team of 10 engineers had developed an array-based processing
architecture and algorithms.
"ACL did innovative work in image processing that was being applied to the defense side for pattern matching. They were developing technologies that could
be used in robotics and machine vision, and we felt it could be extended to the camcorder market as well," Agarwal said.
More camera memory
"Array processors excel at capturing a complex image in one clock cycle. But loading and unloading the image to and from memory took forever, and we
wanted to apply our embedded DRAM technology to that problem," he said.
An image-processing chip for video cameras is expected by the end of next year, he said. After that, Agarwal has his eye on the convergence of mobility and
multimedia: Web phones that can display MPEG-4 compressed video images.
Once the 3G phone standard is established, Web phones and other handhelds that display video will come to market.
"The challenge will be, how do you develop ICs which can take in MPEG-4 video with a low bit rate, and display high-quality images while keeping power
consumption down? Our approach is to use a DRAM process to develop solutions which provide the performance needed, but keep power consumption
down. You can always deliver performance by pushing the processor clock, but that burns power," he said.
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By: David Lammers
Copyright 1999 CMP Media Inc.
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