SGS-Thomson chips..................................
I'm more concerned about STM as a Cube competitor than I am about the other "competitors," because they build and sell lots of MPEG2 decoder chips for DTV. However, no one commented on your post of the STM press releases. The first two STM chips are for PC-DVD:
<<SGS-Thomson Microelectronics will soon sample two single-chip decoders targeted at
the PC-DVD market. The STi3560 is designed for high-performance, full-hardware
DVD decoding on the PC and integrates MPEG-2 video decoder, two-channel Dolby
audio decoder, and other DVD peripheral functions. The STi3540 is designed for
lower-cost implementations in which DVD audio decoding is performed in software.
The STi3540 is sampling now, is scheduled for fourth-quarter production, and is $21
in100,000s. The STi3560 will begin sampling in September, with production expected
in the fourth quarter; it is $27 in 100,000s.>>
The STi3540 is "sampling now, with produciton in Q4," but it doesn't do audio decoding.
The STi3560 has 2-channel audio, but it won't sample until September, with availability supposedly in Q4. Two channel audio may be fine for a PC, but it doesn't look this chip is geared for the standalone DVD market. Maybe STM is telling us that it thinks the PC-DVD market will grow much more quickly than the standalone DVD market, and they don't have a chip that is ready. Yet.
Below is the other STM press release that you posted -- the single-chip MPEG2 encoder/decoder:
<< SGS-Thomson Microelectronics Inc. (STM) has begun sampling one of the Omega MPEG-2 audio/video recorders that it described at last winter's Western Cable show. The STi5500 includes MPEG and peripheral functions to allow the implementation of full DVD or set-top decoder subsystems in a single chip.
The One-chip Multimedia Engine Architecture, called Omega, uses as its core the
ST20-C2 RISC architecture, a processor with a 40-MHz clock. The
memory/cache subsystem in the chip includes 2 kbytes of instruction cache and 2
kbytes of data cache. Another endec subsystem provides all MPEG-2
encode/decode functions, as well as PAL/NTSC encoding functions.>>
The STi5500 has an MPEG2 decoder, MPEG2 ENcoder, and PAL/NTSC encoder all on one chip. At $35 for 100,000 units? Am I reading this correctly? An MPEG2 codec and PAL/NTSC in one chip for $35? I just cannot believe it. I don't know how they could produce a 256 pin chip for this price.
What are your thoughts on the STM press releases? |
