Startup rolls SXGA monitor-on-chip
David Lieberman
08/23/1999
Electronic Engineering Times
Page 16
Copyright 1999 CMP Publications Inc.
SAN JOSE, CALIF. - SmartASIC Inc., a new contender in the monitor-on-a-chip game, has just introduced an SXGA-level chip for controlling active-matrix LCDs. A 1998 startup, SmartASIC faces significant competition but claims to have strong core competencies in all the things it takes to turn a display into a monitor or electronic projector: digital video processing, decoding, format conversion, timing recovery, deinterlaing, interpolation, decimation and dithering, as well as display interfacing.
SmartASIC's main competition comes from Sage Inc . (San Jose), Genesis Microchip Corp. (Markham, Ontario), Silicon Image Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.), Arithmos (Santa Clara, Calif.) and PixelWorks (Tualatin, Ore.).
The SXGA SD1200 chip, packaged in a 160-pin PQFP and priced at between $20 and $25 in 1,000-unit quantities, follows the earlier introduction of SVGA and XGA versions, which "have been adopted by several leading TFT [thin-film transistor] LCD monitor manufacturers worldwide," said C. C. Kau, president and chief executive officer of SmartASIC. "Some are shipping products now and more will ship this summer in the U.S., Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Europe."
Reduced cost
According to Kau, "Two major forces will help further drive down the price of LCD monitors [and increase their penetration]: lower display costs and lower electronics costs. The SD1200 lets LCD monitor manufacturers reduce the bill of materials of the interface control board for 16- to 19-inch TFT LCD monitors to $55 to $60," he said.
Usable for both analog- and digital-interface LCD monitors, the chip provides "a true plug-and-play solution," Kau said, "with automatic input-mode detection and autophase calibration, so the LCD monitor can ensure precise clock synchronization for high image quality. No special driver or manual adjustment is required for timing detection." Also, he said, "Unlike other LCD monitor controllers, the SD1200 does not require an external CPU chip to perform the automatic calibration." And because it has internal buffer memory, "it does not require external frame buffer memory."
The SD1200 also has built-in flexibility for interfacing to LCDs from different manufacturers, generating timing signals, for example, from parameters saved in E2PROM.
The chip manages full-color panels with 8 bits of red, green and blue, but it can also generate pseudo-true-color support on less-expensive 6-bit panels, "employing two dithering algorithms and frame rate control to support 16.7 million true colors," Kau said. A unique standalone mode is also built in, which "is useful for monitor testing. This lets LCD monitor manufacturers display patterns on the screen with no external computer connection."
August 23, 1999 |
