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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Rieman who wrote (44559)	9/7/1999 4:57:00 PM
From: BillyG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

C-Cube plans double duty for high-definition codec platform eetimes.com By Junko Yoshida EE Times (09/07/99, 12:30 p.m. EDT) AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — C-Cube Microsystems (Milpitas, Calif.) will demonstrate its first high-definition codec platform next week at the International Broadcasting Convention. The DVx-HD platform promises to bring high-definition encoding capability to video broadcasting and production. The platform connects up to nine C-Cube DVx processors to enable high-definition encoding. It allows a flexible multichip configuration that enables scalable encoding, ranging from MPEG 4:2:0 and 4:2:2 chroma high-definition (HD) formats to 1,080-line interlaced and progressive formats as well as 720p and 480p image sizes. "The DVx-HD is the industry's first single-platform architecture designed for broadcast and video production," said Fermi Wang, vice president and general manager of C-Cube's PC/Codec Division. C-Cube claims to hold 80 percent of the encoder chip market, but it is not the first vendor to field a high-definition encoder. Many such systems, built using either a discrete solution designed by Mitsubishi or silicon developed by IBM Microelectronics, are already up and running at U.S. network TV studios. But Wang said C-Cube is betting that system OEMs will be attracted to DVx-HD's "picture quality, programmability and cost." C-Cube asserts that DVx-HD offers superior picture quality in HD broadcast encoding applications. The architecture's interprocessor communications bus lets multiple DVx encoding processors intelligently share such information as motion vectors, reference data and statistics for each image. The encoder thus can make intelligent decisions about dynamic bit allocation to each processor. "This allows our encoder to produce a high-quality picture that is uniform across the image," Wang said. Some competing HD encoders first slice the image into six separate tiles and apply one standard-definition (SD) encoding processor to encode each tile — for a total of six encoder chips for six tiles. The tiles are then stitched to produce the HD image. The tiling/stitching method works, Wang acknowledged, but because there is no communication among the encoder chips, there can be no data sharing and no overlap image processing. For broadcast encoding, OEMs have the option of using nine DVx chips (for 1080i MPEG-2 High Level @ Main Profile encoding), six chips (for 720P encoding) or four chips (for 480P). Because the platform supports both SD and HD, OEMs can use one system to migrate from one format or to allow production and transmission of SD and HD from within a single system. Power consumption when using nine chips is "less than 18 watts," according to Wang. For video production applications such as editing and storage, the platform offers what Wang called "the industry's first complete HD system design." DVx-HD is suited for video production because of the need to both encode and decode for editing, he said. Further, the platform allows MPEG 4:2:2 (300-Mbit) throughput for high-bit-rate mezzanine compression, a requirement for HD nonlinear editing. DVx-HD could also be built on a single PC card, since four DVx chips fit on one PCI card. For video editing, OEMs can use four DVx chips to perform intraframe-only encoding, yielding MPEG 4:2:2 1080i images. While C-Cube is ready with its DVx-HD hardware architecture, it is still working on software for HD editing applications. Wang said the software should be ready by the spring.