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To: DiViT who wrote (45110)	9/21/1999 4:03:00 PM
From: Black-Scholes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Xilinx Expects No Impact to Current Quarter's Business Following Earthquake in Taiwan SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 21, 1999--Xilinx, Inc. (Nasdaq: XLNX) today announced that it does not expect financial results for the current quarter to be impacted by Monday's earthquake in Taiwan. There, I did it for them!!!

To: DiViT who wrote (45110)	9/21/1999 6:23:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Sigma did put AC-3 decode on chip........................ eet.com Sigma Designs aims DVD silicon at consumer apps By Junko Yoshida EE Times (09/21/99, 2:28 p.m. EDT) MILPITAS, Calif. ? Sigma Designs Inc., a vendor of DVD playback chips for PCs, is shifting gears to attack the embedded consumer electronics market. The company is launching a new DVD decoder chip aimed at home theater, Web DVD boxes and in-car players. The company's EM8400 integrates a proprietary 80-Mips RISC core, program stream demultiplexer, MPEG-2 and AC-3 decoding, content scrambling system (CSS) decryption, display controller and NTSC/PAL TV encoding in a single chip. The EM8400 required a major silicon redesign by Sigma Design engineers, who had to add hardware blocks for such functions as audio decoding and program stream demultiplexing to the company's existing silicon. Those functions had been left for a host PC to process in software in Sigma Design's previous REALmagic chip for PC-based DVD playback. While the market already has plenty of chip solutions for straightforward DVD players, the EM8400 is set apart by its multimarket approach. Leveraging its relationships with Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp., Sigma Design holds high hopes for driving the new chip ? tightly combined with software support ? into a variety of Windows CE-based consumer systems ranging from Microsoft TV set-tops, the Microsoft-led Venus project in China and the Intel-initiated Auto PC. The company, however, is not committed to WinCE solutions alone. It is also adding software driver support to other embedded operating systems, including those of QNX and VxWorks. Processor support Further, while the EM8400-based system solution is initially designed for combo DVD players using an X86 CPU, Sigma Design plans to add support for MIPS, ARM and Hitachi SH processors in the first quarter of 2000, said William Wong, the company's vice president of marketing. The EM8400 is designed to cover all bases for a variety of DVD applications. The company claims the device is good for portable DVD players as well as high-end home theater systems, where it is said to handle progressive DVD playback. Power dissipation is 1 watt, and a sleep-mode power management feature suits the chip for portable applications, Sigma said. "Consumer electronics companies interested in launching a home theater DVD player capable of displaying progressive video can now do so without adding a line doubler chip to their DVD players," said Wong. Since the EM8400 integrates a video scalar with bilinear interpolation, the source recorded on a DVD can be displayed not only in native 720 x 480-pixel interlaced (i) video, but also in 720 x 480 progressive (p), or be upconverted to HDTV resolutions such as 720p, 960p and 1,080i. The chip supports DVD, VCD as well as China's SVCD standard, while the on-chip audio decoder supports Dolby Digital, DTS and the high-end DVD-Audio format newly standardized by the DVD Forum. It doesn't handle the Super Audio CD system developed by Philips and Sony, however. Fabricated at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. using a 0.25-micron CMOS process, the EM8400 is capable of 8-bit on-screen display, subpicture and 4-bit alpha blending. Evaluation samples will be available in late October, with mass production slated for the fourth quarter. The price is $39 each in lots of 1,000.