DVD becomes a household word
Junko Yoshida
12/22/97
Electronic Engineering Times
Page 60
Copyright 1997 CMP Publications Inc.
Despite the prolonged squabbles over copy protection, incompatible rewritable formats and a critical shortage of titles, DVD movie players and DVD -ROM drives for PCs finally reached consumers in 1997. This includes standalone players, add-in cards and those integrated into PCs, employing a variety of chip sets and system designs.
But the DVD system that genuinely functions as a bridge between TV and PC-the original vision of many in the consumer and PC industries-is still not ready for prime time. Nevertheless, it has not been forgotten and could arrive in late 1998 as DVD makers claim they are already helping system vendors tackle their crucial cost and integration problems.
Compared with their counterparts in the consumer end, PC system designers have enjoyed more options in the way they implement DVD . Solutions range from all-hardware-based DVD decoding to software-only decode leveraging processing power-in the new Pentium II/266 MHz or above-to hybrid software/hardware implementations.
By contrast, most standalone DVD players from consumer-electronics vendors this year were pretty much stuck with year-old first-generation chip sets-six or seven discrete ICs-developed by those companies' semiconductor divisions.
However, this landscape is destined to change soon. Awaiting the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas early next month are a variety of DVD players in a variety of shapes and colors and with a variety of purposes. Many showed up first at the Japan Electronics Show last October. Typical VCR-like DVD players, housed in nondescript set-top black boxes, are quickly disappearing. "Plain vanilla DVD players will be definitely out," said Isaac Shenberg, vice president of marketing and sales at Zoran Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.).
Instead, slick portables, combination DVD /Internet/game products and in-car DVD systems are promised in 1998. U.S. chip vendors, such as Zoran and LSI Logic, say they are getting a piece of the action in the second-generation DVD system-design cycle, with their highly integrated DVD player silicon. By integrating all the key building blocks of a DVD player-MPEG-2 video, Dolby Digital and a Content Scrambling System (CSS)-into a single chip opens the way to a new wave of DVD players, they say.
Two products that stood out at the Japan Electronics Show were Matsushita's slick, portable DVD player with a color LCD and Toshiba's compact DVD player, called Vision Connect, which can run DVD movies, games, DVD -ROM titles and Windows and can surf the Web. It sits atop a TV.
Matsushita is reportedly working on its own chip set for its portable products. However, such portable designs have sent a clear signal to U.S. chip vendors that chips that consume little power will become a mandate in 1998. For example, LSI Logic believes its highly integrated L64020, consuming fewer than 800 mW, is unbeatable in the current market.
But the challenge to get the chips designed into leading Japanese manufacturers' DVD players is much more fundamental. Great video quality requiring robust MPEG-2 decoding, digital filtering and audio quality with surround effects are a given. More important is that DVD silicon offer all the features of a quality VCR or laser-disk player, such as smooth fast forward and backward playback at variable speed. Such tricks are a breeze in the analog domain, but not so easy for MPEG-based digitally compressed pictures.
Meanwhile, Zoran's Vaddis DVD decoder IC chalked up a major design win earlier this month from Sharp Corp. "We believe that this is the industry's first design win for much more integrated second-generation set-top solutions," said Shenberg.
While many chip vendors anticipate the emergence of Internet/ DVD /game/Windows or Windows CE products in 1998, such an eclectic product presents a few inherent problems. Designing an application-specific standard product (ASSP) with a superset of features is one way to do it. But such a chip is usually overkill in the consumer market, said Alain Bismuth, strategic marketing director for DVD consumer products at LSI Logic (Milpitas, Calif.). "Our approach is to build an ASIC leveraging our coreware technology."
Zoran's Shenberg acknowledges that the company's biggest immediate competitors are most likely to be Japanese system vendors' semiconductor divisions. "They are close to their customers and they know exactly what to design," he said. But he said Zoran is committed to developing microcode modules-which the company calls "software silicon"-by making the most of the power left over on its 40-Mips DSP-based Vaddis chip after processing all the basic DVD decoding functions. Such modules are expected to help system vendors differentiate their products or add features for emerging combination products.
Another wild card is a DVD -RAM-based rewritable DVD player/recorder. Bismuth said such a product will not be available at a consumer price next year, but LSI Logic is among the chip vendors gearing up for ICs capable of handling MPEG-2 encode/decode. C-Cube Microsystems and Sony have already outlined plans for a consumer-grade MPEG-2 encoder.
On another front, DVD -ready PCs only began to appear late this year, confounding the more bullish industry forecasts. Both economic and political issues made it difficult for PC vendors to deploy all software-based DVD decoding in their baseline PCs. The cost of DVD -ROM drives and necessary ICs was still quite high, while Hollywood studios and the consumer electronics and PC industries spent months debating how secure it is to let the CPU on a PC unscramble CSS in software.
Thus, the most prevalent implementation in the PC space was an add-in DVD decoder card and DVD -ROM drive. For instance, the Mpact media processor from Chromatic Research (Sunnyvale, Calif.) was designed into PCI add-in cards from board vendors such as STB Systems and E4.
Evolving as a trend in the latter half of 1997 was a three-way split in DVD decode implementations, associated with three PC categories. While free DVD remains central for most PC vendors, some of the leaders embraced hardware-based DVD decoding for their high-end PCs and PC/TVs. Among them: Gateway 2000's Destination products and Compaq PC Theatre. "PC companies were not willing to compromise the quality of audio and picture," said Tim Vehling, manager of platform marketing at Chromatic. "Many PC vendors were very aware that frame dropping on a DVD , for example, would be unacceptable."
The PC industry is dependent on Intel's Pentium II 266-MHz-or-above CPU to handle decoding of MPEG-2/Dolby Digital/CSS and DVD navigation in software. Zoran is a clear winner in this segment, armed with its CompCore's SoftDVD. The software-only solution got a boost from graphics-chip vendors such as ATI Technologies Inc. (Toronto), which integrated motion-compensation capability into its 2-D/3-D/video chip. |
