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

To: BillyG who wrote (26319)	12/8/1997 1:29:00 PM
From: DiViT	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50808

Sony encoder targets consumer market -- Single-chip MPEG-2 device intended for DVD authoring Mark Hachman ÿ 12/08/97 Electronic Buyers' News Page 17 Copyright 1997 CMP Publications Inc. ÿ Silicon Valley- While its competitors design multichip MPEG-2 encoders for the professional-broadcast market, Sony Semiconductor Co. of America is aiming its single-chip product at the consumer. The Sony CXD1922Q combines MPEG-2 encoding, the system controller, and motion estimation into a single chip manufactured with a 0.4-micron process. It will begin sampling in January for about $600. That price is expected to fall as the chip enters volume production, then moves to a 0.25-micron process in the second half of 1998, Sony executives said. "Our target is consumer DVD authoring," said Vishwanath Nayak, director of marketing at the consumer audio/video/digital division at Sony, San Jose. Such applications don't require the most complex encoding algorithms, enabling the company to use a less sophisticated formula. Sony's competitors, notably C - Cube Microsystems Inc. and LSI Logic Corp., are also moving into single-chip MPEG-2 codecs, chips that can encode and decode data. However, the additional cost to integrate both functions makes them unsuitable for the volume market, according to Nayak. "First of all, at Comdex we showed this chip running alongside another Sony decoder, so we do have this capability," Nayak said. "But 95% of a codec is the encoder, anyway." Even so, analysts said that comparing Sony's encoder with C - Cube 's DVx codec is risky. "In its current form, C - Cube 's [codec] is a very high-end system-on-a-chip for the broadcast market," said Jonathan Cassell, an industry analyst at Dataquest Inc., San Jose. On the other hand, "Sony has produced a dedicated single-function chip. The MPEG-2 market represents an opportunity to supply products at multiple price/performance levels. In the near term, however, the opportunity lies within the broadcast market," Cassell said. Sony's CXD1930 MPEG-2/AC-3 decoder costs about $25 to $35 in volume, and is packaged in a 208-pin PQFP. It will sample in the first quarter of 1998. C - Cube has said the price of its DVx codec will be reduced for the consumer market in 1998. For capturing MPEG-2 video used while the camera is horizontally panning, the CXD1922Q offers a search range of -288 to +297.5 horizontal pixels, searchable at half-pixel accuracy. The chip supports Main Profile@ Main Level and Simple Profile@ Main Level with NTSC-encoded image sizes up to 720x480 pixels at 30 frames per second or PAL-encoded images at 720x576 at 25 frames/s for PAL output. The CXD1922Q is packaged in a 208-pin QFP.