Neomagic getting into the DVD drive controller business........
eetimes.com
Embedded DRAM vendor lays out diversification plans
By David Lammers
EE Times
(11/03/99, 5:35 p.m. EDT)
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — NeoMagic Corp., the only company to have
successfully integrated DRAM and logic in a volume product, has set its
sights on other markets, including those for DVD controllers, video cameras
and Web phones, according to president and chief executive officer Prakash
Agarwal.
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 in a device produced in a
DRAM process. Instead, NeoMagic is looking to other high-volume markets
where multimedia and mobility converge.
Starting in the first quarter of 2000, NeoMagic expects to begin sampling an
integrated DVD controller with read channel and control capabilities,
including its vaunted embedded DRAM.
Early this year, NeoMagic acquired the optical-drive development group from
Mitel Semiconductor (Manchester, England). The purchase added 16
engineers with mixed-signal design capabilities to NeoMagic's staff, plus a
DVD optical-storage read-channel product line that NeoMagic merged with
its own DVD drive electronics efforts that were already under way.
The DVD market is wide, with products spanning the computer, video and
audio realms, and 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. |
