"Many technology companies go to SDMI meetings not necessarily to influence its choices, but to make sure their technologies aren't left out in the cold. "We want to make sure the standard remains open," said Rachel Walkden, director of audio initiatives at Lucent Technologies Inc.
"Lucent is aggressively promoting its proprietary audio codec, called EPAC, which the company claims has "CD-transparent" music quality. Lucent has ambitions to broadly license the EPAC codec and EPAC-based players to consumers and OEMs, though Walkden said the company understands that the format ultimately needs to be sold to major music labels through private negotiations, independent of SDMI."
"TI is set to unveil a new DSP, the TMS320C54X, for consumer OEMs looking for a silicon solution for portable Internet music players. The company's TMS320C5410 has already been designed into Lucent's EPAC player and NTT's TwinVQ model. But TI is spinning another version, scheduled for volume production in the fourth quarter, by adding more on-chip memory and lowering power dissipation, according to Johnson."
"At this juncture, companies like Lucent are not assuming anything about the upcoming SDMI spec. "We are being very sensitive to the recording industry's needs," Walkden said. Lucent's EPAC proposal will include an encryption system developed by an unnamed third party, as well as a watermarking system developed by Cognicity. Watermark detection, Walkden said, is most likely to be handled by a PC's host processor."
"It's going to be a scramble for OEMs to design a system that meets all the SDMI requirements in such a short time frame," said Fred Falk, chief executive at e.Digital Corp. (San Diego), a system-design house that is developing a reference design for the EPAC player for Lucent and its OEMs. The design leverages e.Digital's patented MicroOS file-management system, which the company claims promises a faster turnaround of a system that needs last-minute changes."
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