Startup puts MPEG-2 encoder in fast forward
By Junko Yoshida
SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Attacking what some see as the first real market for digital video in the consumer-electronics space, a startup here hopes to steal a march on larger, more established players by rolling out a key silicon ingredient for digital recording: a low-cost, highly integrated MPEG-2 encoder.
iCompression Inc. has started sampling a device capable of encoding video, audio and system multiplexing on one chip that will hit volume production late in the third quarter and sell for $195 apiece in small production quantities.
That schedule would make the iCompression device one of the first to hit the sub-$200 magic price point for an MPEG-2 encoder, opening the door to use in consumer systems such as PCs and DVD players. The latter have proved slow to take off in the market, in part because they lack the recording functions of an analog VCR, despite their higher price tags.
The tiny company, with a staff of 11, will compete with such established system- and chip-market forces as IBM Microelectronics, Matsushita, Sony and C-Cube Microsystems in the race to deliver - for less than $200 - what is considered a key component for digital video in next-generation VCRs and PCs.
"We believe we are at least eight months to 12 months ahead of our competitors," claimed Govind Kizhepat, president of iCompression. He said his company's mission is "to develop a good compression technology for desktop, networking and consumer applications."
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The Vivace-izC, a 100,000-gate chip with on-chip memory, features two proprietary digital signal processing (DSP) cores and executes native Java Virtual Machine byte code. It was fabbed in Japan by NEC Corp. on a 0.35-micron CMOS process.
Affordable MPEG-2 encoders are considered a major enabler for building full DVD player-recorders. Current MPEG-2 encoders from IBM and C-Cube Microsystems (Milpitas, Calif.) target professional broadcasting gear and cost more than $1,000.
C-Cube has been among the most vocal in touting a plan to leverage its professional MPEG-2 encoding expertise for consumer applications. Feng-Ming Wang, vice president and general manager of the PC codec division at C-Cube, said the company is spinning a single-chip consumer MPEG-2 video codec from its DVx architecture, developed for professional broadcasting, and a Microsparc core. The consumer codec is slated for launch in the second half.
Meanwhile, at this year's International Solid-State Circuits Conference, Japanese consumer giants Matsushita Electronic Industrial and Sony Corp. separately detailed development of low-power, smaller-die-size, single-chip MPEG-2 encoders.
Initially targeting the Matsushita group of companies, Matsushita is due to sample by the end of this month a single-chip MPEG-2 video encoder with claimed power consumption as low as 0.95 W and a chip size of 100 mm2.
Sony, for its part, has begun sampling a low-cost MPEG-2 video encoder for consumer applications that features a newly developed wide-search-range motion-estimation algorithm.
iCompression, with its highly integrated solution, hopes to steal some of the giants' thunder. Unlike C-Cube's planned chip, iCompression's IC does not include a decode function. But the startup has integrated MPEG-1 audio encoding and MPEG-2 system multiplexing onto a single chip that also provides MPEG-2 Main Profile @ Main Level video encoding.
Pivotal part
The move to a single-chip MPEG-2 encoder could herald an era in which silicon vendors play a pivotal role in enabling new digital-video consumer products like rewritable DVD-based camcorders, video recorders and Web set-tops. PC OEMs are also demanding low-cost but high-quality encoding technologies as they add features like video e-mail, home-video editing and TV-program recording to models scheduled for launch this year.
Whether the video-information source is in a digital TV or analog NTSC format - and whether it will be stored in a PC hard drive, rewritable DVD drive or standalone consumer device - it must have access to an affordable and efficient encoding technology. Encoding is key to minimizing storage space and thereby reducing overall system cost for mass-market applications.
Exactly when and how consumer MPEG-2 encoding will wield its initial influence on the market is a tough nut to crack, however. DVD system vendor Toshiba Corp., for example, has been unwilling to predict when DVD-RAM might begin replacing VHS as a digital video recording device. Koji Hase, general manager of the DVD projects division at Toshiba, said that it will be some time before "VHS disappears from the market."
What's not in dispute is that if MPEG-2-based DVD-RAMs are to succeed in supplanting VHS-format VCRs, they must offer advantages that current VCRs can't provide. One feature that would distinguish the DVD-based recording system from VHS recording is that it would let the user walk in on a program in progress, "rewind" the program as it's being recorded and watch it from the beginning, as the encoding device continues to record the program until its scheduled conclusion. In other words, the user would not have to wait until the end of the program before rewinding and watching it from the opening credits.
A "simultaneous real-time encoding/decoding capability" makes such a scenario feasible, a C-Cube spokeswoman said.
Microsoft Corp.'s Bill Gates, a strong advocate of "intelligent TV recording" on Windows 98-based home PCs, demonstrated the concept this spring during his keynote speech at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference The demo, based on C-Cube's yet-to-be launched MPEG-2 video encode/decode chip, showcased such emerging PC functions as live video recording, instant replays of televised sports action and home-video editing. Video clips compressed by an MPEG-2 chip and stored on a PC hard drive were transferred to a write-once DVD disk. The disk was then inserted into a standalone consumer DVD player for instant playback, demonstrating complete interoperability among disparate systems based on the MPEG-2 standard.
C-Cube and iCompression both see the PC as the initial market for their consumer MPEG-2 chips, though they differ slightly on targeted applications. C-Cube initially will emphasize PC-based TV recording and creation of DVD home-video titles.
The company claims to be working with multiple independent software vendors (ISVs) on applications. "We believe that the development of consumer software packages for MPEG-2 encoding applications is absolutely critical to building market momentum," said Wang.
iCompression, for its part, is targeting video e-mail, video editing and Web-based video distribution as primary desktop-PC applications for its chip. The startup also expects to see the emergence of MPEG-2-based videoconferencing.
In the consumer space, Kizhepat predicted, MPEG-2-based digital camcorders and DVD-RAM systems will be out in time for the 1999 Christmas shopping season. He said the startup is developing a surveillance camcorder based on MPEG-2 encoding with a large Japanese consumer company.
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The iCompression chip comprises two tailor-made processor cores that run JVM instructions, perform audio DSP and enable and high-level video and sequencing functions. The audio DSP, integrated with an 8-kbyte SRAM, offers programmability for a variety of audio algorithms beyond MPEG-1 audio. The video DSP, integrated with 4 kbytes of SRAM, puts in double duty as a CPU inside the Vivace-izC and as a signal processor.
The chip's video pipeline includes a scaling and filtering unit and MPEG-2 encoding engine to support dynamic group-of-pictures structures.
iCompression intends to make the most of the chip's CPU-like architecture. "We've improved pipeline and cache structures while modularizing each block and [making] it easy to debug," said Kizhepat, who acquired a CPU background when he worked on the Visual Instruction Set (VIS) for Sun Microsystems' Sparc.
Asked why he focused on MPEG-2 encoding for the fledgling consumer market, Kizhepat was blunt. "A real-time MPEG-2 encoder, realizing a high-quality 30 frames per second, is one of the most complex devices that one can design today, because of its required computing throughput and bandwidth," he said. "If this hadn't been so challenging, it wouldn't have interested me."
At C-Cube, which has code-named its consumer MPEG-2 codec technology 2Real, the focus is on combining MPEG-2 video encode and decode. The chip reportedly can decode two video streams simultaneously.
C-Cube's consumer MPEG-2 codec lacks MPEG-1 audio and system-multiplexing capabilities. But the company will provide a total solution, Wang said, by providing for those functions running in software on the PC's CPU. The total solution "takes up around 20 percent of a Pentium 200-MHz CPU's processing power," he estimated.
If intelligent TV recording does become a popular feature, coding efficiency will be critical. Wang predicted that consumers will demand two features: video quality and storage space.
At that juncture, he said, "We believe a technique such as variable-bit-rate [VBR] encoding becomes a critical [point of] differentiation." VBR lets a system allocate bits dynamically, in accordance with the complexity of the picture it is encoding.
Wang noted C-Cube's expertise in encoding for the professional market and its ability to leverage microcode developed for statistical multiplexing.
iCompression's chip encodes at 2 to 30 Mbits/s but lacks VBR, and the target bit rate has to be set. Still, Kizehepat noted, "the chip has signal pins to handshake to do VBR, if statistical multiplexing is done outside. We can dynamically change the bit rate" if the stimulus is external.
"The key to getting quality, whether it is VBR or constant-bit-rate, is how closely can you allocate bits for a given macro- block," he said. "Our pipeline is only one macroblock behind when allocating bits." The company is seeking a patent, he said
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