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

To: Peter V who wrote (28014)	1/13/1998 12:50:00 PM
From: DiViT	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 50808

Yes, I saw he's at it again... I don't think they will be able to sample production chips to companies until Q2 at least. To have a "true" single chip they would first have to have a chip, period. Cube has a true single chip encoder today. Ask Alex to clarify what he means. I don't think he can.

To: Peter V who wrote (28014)	1/13/1998 3:13:00 PM
From: BillyG	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50808

New Patents for Digital VCR and HDTV Decoder from Goldstar and Hitachi The New York Times 01/12/98 1) Goldstar: Digital VCR patent 5,682,457 > Goldstar Ltd., the Korean electronics company, has won a patent for a VCR that can record and playback a digital signal on current Super-VHS tapes. Goldstar is part of LG Electronics, which also holds a majority share of Zenith Electronics. In step with Goldstar, Matsushita Electric Industrial's JVC has also announced plans to introduce a digital VCR that uses standard-sized tapes. Thus yet another war over formats may be brewing in the digital television revolution. > Goldstar's digital VCR uses a cartridge with conventional Super-VHS magnetic tape. The company says that a VHS tape can record a signal with a bandwidth of up to 4.4 megahertz; a Super-VHS tape can handle a signal of up to 7 megahertz. > Goldstar's engineers -- Sang Joon Woo, Kook Hyun Jang, Tai Suk Yang and Taik Sang Oh -- manage to squeeze a wide-bandwidth digital television signal into a narrow-bandwidth Super-VHS tape by dividing the signal into two channels, inserting timing markers into the split signals, and then reuniting the signal for playback. > Goldstar and its team of inventors received patent 5,682,457. 2) Hitachi: HDTV Decoder patent 5,635,985 > Hitachi America Ltd. has received a patent for a decoder that can translate digital high-definition or digital standard-definition signals into an analog signal. High definition is a digital signal with greatly improved picture quality; standard definition is a digital signal with the same resolution as analog television. Broadcasters are interested in both signals because they offer singular advantages over analog TV. High definition offers a great picture, but transmission is so complex it fills up an entire channel. Standard definition offers an ordinary picture but leaves enough room in the channel to broadcast more than one signal. > Building a decoder that can handle both signals is an expensive undertaking, one that manufacturers believed would make inexpensive analog TV's almost as costly as some digital sets. That is because the vast amount of data in an HDTV signal requires at least 10 megabytes of computer memory. > But Hitachi says it has patented a technology that cuts those costs by maximizing the common circuitry used to down convert both high-definition and standard-definition pictures. > The Hitachi decoder accomplishes this by ''preparsing'' and ''downsampling'' -- two terms for reducing the amount of data used to represent digital pictures. Bytes of data used to represent pixels, the points of light that make up a video picture, are reduced from eight bits to five, six or seven. > Hitachi and the inventors Jill Boyce and Larry Pearlstein received patent 5,635,985.