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To: Moonray who wrote (11274)	3/28/1998 5:26:00 PM
From: Mang Cheng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25814

"LSI's decode silicon snags DVD win" By David Lammers March 30, 1998, TechWeb News Tokyo - Sony Corp. put second-generation DVD players on the Japan market last week, and LSI Logic Corp. said the Sony offerings represent the first major design wins for LSI's MPEG-2 decoding silicon. The market for DVD players is expected to roughly triple this year, to about 2.5 million units, as prices for the players and for DVD-ROM decline, and software authoring picks up. The second-generation systems are based on much more highly integrated ICs: the decoding engine, a drive controller, MCU, DRAMs and a few supporting chips are all that is required for the drives coming on the market this year. "Compared with Sony's first-generation DVD player, the MPEG-2 decode IC is about half the price, and includes much more functions," said Tadao Fukushima, a DVD product marketing manager at LSI Logic's Japan subsidiary. In volumes, the decode engine, dubbed L64020, will cost less than $25. The early DVD players came under fire for dropping pixels in fast-action scenes, but that problem has been resolved both by better MPEG-2 decoding silicon and improved authoring systems, said Alain Bismuth, director of consumer DVD marketing at LSI Logic (Milpitas, Calif.). Also, the authoring systems are quicker: What used to take a week now can be authored in a day or two, with better quality. Bismuth, a Frenchman, said Europe now is leaning toward the use of Dolby Digital, the new name for Dolby AC-3 audio. If that happens, all the major markets would adhere to the Dolby Digital audio standard for DVD players. For DVD audio, the regions are considering unique standards. Special effects Consumers who shop for a DVD player often do two things in the store: look at the playback of a few minutes of a movie, and then check the DVD players' ability to fast forward, reverse, slow reverse and hold a still image on a screen. Fukushima said Sony and other "brand name" DVD vendors use the 500 on-chip registers to tailor their microcode so that these special effects can be optimized. The DVD players from Sony are priced about $450 and up, a major price drop from the early Sony DVD "reference design" players, which were priced in the $1,000 range. Bismuth said LSI Logic used a 0.35-micron process, which cut power consumption to about 0.7 W. Since most of the major manufacturers will build portable versions of the DVD players and DVD-ROM drives, and plan to use the same silicon in both, the low power consumption of the 2 million-transistor LSI decode engine is an advantage in getting designed into tethered systems as well. Though Toshiba Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial have developed their own MPEG-2 decode silicon, other major consumer-electronics companies are expected to use commercially available silicon. Because few Japanese consumer-electronics vendors will buy silicon from their major competitors in Japan, much of the market will go to U.S. chip vendors. Jan Goodsell, marketing vice president at LSI Logic K.K., said LSI's engineering presence in Japan helped convince Sony to go with its product. About half of LSI's design team for the decoder were based in Japan. Also, LSI fabricates the device at its fab in Tsukuba, with its 1,200 workers. Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc. techweb.com Mang