"That helped keep the DVxplore out of boxes designed by TiVo Inc."
C-Cube codec serves double duty -- Encodes, decodes MPEG-2 simultaneously to reduce high prices
Mark Hachman
01/10/2000
Electronic Buyers' News
Page 36
Copyright 2000 CMP Publications Inc.
Silicon Valley- By tying together simultaneous real-time MPEG-2 encoding and decoding, C-Cube Microsystems Inc. hopes to lower the chip count that has kept time-shifting set-top-box prices high.
C-Cube 's new DVxcel codec-whose prior brand name, DVxtreme, was dropped due to trademark concerns-encodes and decodes MPEG-2 bitstreams simultaneously. The company's previous-generation DVxplore codec performed encoding and decoding in a binary fashion-it could perform one or the other, but not both.
That helped keep the DVxplore out of boxes designed by TiVo Inc. and manufactured by Philips Electronics. A spokesman for TiVo, Sunnyvale, Calif., said the Philips box, which costs $499 retail, contains a separate Sony Electronics MPEG-2 encoder and an IBM MPEG-2 decoder.
That's the high-volume market C-Cube now hopes to attack. Although
the Milpitas, Calif.-based company has shipped encoders for the production and broadcast market, its future is in the high-volume consumer space, said Patrick Henry, vice president of marketing and system solutions.
Henry added that C-Cube believes time shifting-the ability to pause live TV feeds-will eventually exist merely as a set-top feature, not as a discrete box.
According to Henry, those market requirements will demand a high-volume, low-cost product. The DVxcel codec includes much of the same "E4" codec technology and proprietary PerfectView compression algorithm designed into the older DVxcel, but C-Cube has pared the line widths from a 0.3- to a 0.22-micron process.
"One of our pricing goals is to get these codecs down to the same general price as codecs today, about $40," Henry said. "That's the penetration point."
Additional features of the DVxcel include the ability to encode and decode at bit rates from 1.8 to 10 Mbits/s. The chip connects to 16- and 32-bit host processors, and integrates separate bitstream I/O ports for direct peripheral connections.
Both the DVxcel and DVxplore chips use a modified Sparc V8 core as internal processing engines. Henry said that next-generation boxes pushing 300 to 400 mips for video and graphics decoding may require a higher-performance CPU, such as those designed by MIPS Technologies Inc., whose embedded processors are widely used in set-top boxes.
"It looks like in that segment, MIPS is the way to go," he said.
In high-volume production quantities, the DVxcel chip will be priced at $29. The company will sample the chip this month and begin volume production in the second quarter.
January 10, 2000 |
