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To: DiViT who wrote (26907)	12/19/1997 1:15:00 PM
From: Bill DeMarco	Respond to of 50808

Pasonic Develops Single-Chip HDTV Decoder (12/19/97; 10:27 a.m. EST) By Jack Robertson, Electronic Buyers' News Panasonic AVC Audiovisual American Laboratories unveiled on Thursday what it said is the world's first single-chip compression decoder for high-definition TV (HDTV). The Panasonic research center, which is a part of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. of Japan, said the chip will be ready for HDTV sets, set-top boxes, and computer tuners when the first U.S. digital TV broadcasts start next fall. The Panasonic chip decodes the MPEG-2 digital compressed video signal and can drive the display for any of the 18 different formats that might be used in the American HDTV standard. The chip is fabricated in a 0.35-micron process in a 240-pin package. Because it is a single chip, the production cost will be lower than HDTV decoder chip sets previously introduced on the market, Panasonic officials said. That will permit a lower price, still to be set, reducing the overall cost of the digital TV set or appliance, they added. The high cost of inital HDTV sets is seen as an inhibiting factor in growing the market rapidly. Digital set-top boxes and PCs, which can also use the Panasonic single-chip decoder to receive HDTV broadcasts, could be lower priced, observers said. The chip will be shown by Panasonic, in Burlington, N.J., at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas Jan. 8 to 11, 1998.