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To: Stoctrash who wrote (25001)	11/10/1997 12:17:00 PM
From: DiViT	Respond to of 50808

Decoders need to support this... Intel, Microsoft get behind Video Interface Port Anthony Cataldo ÿ 11/10/97 Electronic Engineering Times Page 24 Copyright 1997 CMP Publications Inc. ÿ San Mateo, Calif. - A special bus that links graphics devices to video-controller devices to video-controller chips at CCIR 601 speeds is moving closer to reality. First proposed by SGS-Thomson earlier this year (see Jan. 6, page 18), the Video Interface Port (VIP) has recently been given the nod from both Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. and included in the most-recent PC 98 hardware-design guidelines. The standard is being worked out by the Video Electronics Standard Association (VESA), which is expected to ratify the 1.1 version Friday. A move to the VIP would eliminate the need for graphics-chip companies to adopt proprietary interfaces, and ultimately enable designers to more easily pair video and graphics controllers on the same board. In addition, a number of graphics- and video-controller companies last week said they will adopt VIP in future devices by incorporating the cores from Innovative Semiconductors Inc.(Mountain View, Calif.), a provider of intellectual-property cores for semiconductor companies. They include LSI Logic, SGS-Thomson, S3 and Trident Microsystems. Innovative offers two VIP cores: the SL15 master and the SL10 slave. Companies using Innovative's cores will pay licensing fees to Innovative, though the VIP 1.1 itself is an open standard. "VESA VIP will be the standard interface for PC video devices in 1998 and beyond," said Chris Lam, director of marketing for Innovative and chairman of VESA's video-port committee. "The adoption of VIP by key players in PC video and graphics is a clear indication of VIP's market momentum." Azzedine Boubguira, product-marketing manager for ATI Technologies Inc., said it would be a relatively easy task to reconfigure its own 8-bit interface to conform to the VIP specification. "We have a proprietary interface now, but we're waiting to see where [VESA] is going," he said. VIP fits a bidirectional special-purpose bus into 13 pins using the existing physical connector from the old IBM Feature Connector spec. One side of the bus is a bidirectional, 2-bit address/command path that's used by the graphics controller to control data transfers and poll video chips. The other side is an 8-bit, 33-MHz one-way path for devices to send video into the graphical-user-interface (GUI) controller at 33 Mbytes/second. Electrically, the VIP can handle up to four slave devices in two physical modules. That provides enough room to accommodate a video decoder for camera or line input plus an MPEG-2 decoder for DVD videodisk playback, with capacity left over. Meanwhile, VESA has started work on VIP 2.0, which is aimed at HDTV by increasing the video bandwidth sixfold and the host bus by a factor of four. The committee hopes to introduce a draft proposal by year's end, Lam said.