Winter CES will see first in a planned lineup of more highly integrated, market-specific devices -- IGS bets big on TV-out-capable graphics chips
Anthony Cataldo
01/05/98
Electronic Engineering Times
Page 06
Copyright 1998 CMP Publications Inc.
Las Vegas - IGS Technologies plans to offer two new families of graphics chips with TV-out capabilities early this year.
The announcement comes as OEMs craft designs for next-generation TV set-top boxes for the home and PC companies explore ways of providing TV output as a standard feature.
While consumer interest in browsing the Internet on the TV has been slow to start, the promise of wideband communications through cable boxes, plus the idea of providing higher-quality TV output from the PC, have attracted the attention of a number of chip companies.
IGS hopes to up the ante by introducing highly integrated devices for specific market segments along with software tools to get OEMs to market quickly. The company has a lot riding on its strategy. It has bet big that many consumers will eventually opt to use a TV over a monitor. At the same time, the company is facing stiff competition from larger competitors that either offer more generic TV-out devices, which interface to a separate graphics controller, or have bolted on TV-out capability to an existing graphics processor.
The CyberPro5000, which will be introduced here at the Consumer Electronics Show, builds on the company's existing CyberPro2000 product. It includes features geared specifically for non-PC boxes that incorporate Internet-access capabilities, including cable, satellite and WebTV-type boxes.
Beyond the PC
Like its predecessor, the 5000 integrates a 64-bit GUI accelerator with 200-MHz RAMDAC and has a special bus that allows it to interface to all major X86 and RISC CPUs at bus speeds up to 50 MHz without the need for a bridge chip. Several new features, however, better equip the device for non-PC Internet boxes, according to Mike Raghavan, senior director of marketing for IGS.
For one, the video receiver can accept and display simultaneous video inputs coming from an MPEG decoder, TV, DVD or camcorder. Once the signals have been received, the chip provides direct output for the major TV formats used throughout the world, eliminating the need for a separate frame-buffer memory, according to IGS.
"For broadcast quality, many people don't want to use a frame buffer because it degrades picture quality. You have to scale down then up again. We're doing a direct pass through," Raghavan said.
Another new feature is an optional digital audio engine that complies with the AC'97 specification, which requires a separate off-chip codec. The audio portion includes a microphone interface and stereo speaker out through an I2S interface, as well as FM and 32-channel wavetable synthesis.
Another option that the company is offering is the Macro-vision 7.01 encryption scheme for playback of DVD movies on a TV, a feature expected to be widely seen in DVD -ready PCs next year.
"One of the main driving forces of TV out is systems that will ship with DVD ," said Ken Lowe, director of marketing for IGS competitor Chrontel Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), which introduced its first TV-out devices with Macrovision encryption in November. "Almost 100 percent of them will incorporate TV out," he said.
Unlike IGS, Chrontel is focusing exclusively on improving TV-out capabilities rather than trying to integrate the graphics controller on the same die. Chrontel has fastened a digital interface to its $5 TV-out encoders that links to graphics controllers from several vendors, such as 3Dfx, Nvidea, Chips & Technologies, NeoMagic, Trident and Cirrus Logic. "We want to set the bar for performance, so it makes it difficult for an OEM to desire the integrated approach," Lowe said. "One example is the continual and incremental improvements in text quality. TVs have limited bandwidth compared with a monitor, and limited resolution compared with a CRT. The difficulty IGS will have is penetrating as a graphics company."
Indeed, companies such as S3 Inc. and Trident have already announced graphics devices with TV-out capabilities. And Cirrus Logic recently announced its own NTSC/PAL encoders that accept data streams from a VGA controller or MPEG decoder.
Yet IGS argues it can provide better TV-out quality than its competitors with comparable graphics capabilities for little incremental cost above a standalone TV-out chip. The company's CyberPro5000 will be sampling in January for $15, with a price break for volume purchases by the end of the second quarter.
In February, the company will introduce its first 3-D accelerator with TV-out capability, the CyberPro 3000. That device, which is expected to cost from $15 to $20, will perform setup, rendering and texture mapping, and will process up to 1 million triangles per second.
No z-buffer
One notable feature of the graphics engine is that it does not need z-buffering.
"We can have more resolution with fewer megabytes, and we can also have more memory available for texture buffer," said IGS's Raghavan. "We don't spend all our time drawing the entire triangle; instead, only the portion that needs calculating is done on the fly."
To help OEMs in cutting their board-development time, IGS is also offering software-development kits for the 3000 and 5000 devices for porting to real-time operating systems. Written in C, the new tools will allow customers to port an embedded OS in anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, according to IGS. |
