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

To: BillyG who wrote (33167)	5/12/1998 7:50:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

ZiVA-PC. This would make a better press release.................. ijumpstart.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C-CUBE STAKES OUT NOTEBOOK DVD C-Cube Microsystems Inc. has developed a PC-centric version of the Ziva DVD decoder with an integrated PCI bridge chip and will announce the product today. The PC '98-compliant chip offers the most features of any single-chip DVD decoder yet to ship and company executives say they have the fab in place to fill volume orders now. Toshiba America Information Systems Inc. has committed to incorporate the chip in a notebook expected in the second half of the year. C-Cube executives said they have design wins with other customers yet to announce products. The engineering accomplishment to build the chip, combined with a substantial decrease in memory, will allow system manufacturers to shave off $10 to $15 of the cost of previous Ziva designs, says Chris Day, C-Cube director of marketing. He expects the bill of materials for Ziva PC to come in under $25. The company was able to combine Ziva with a PCI bridge chip through a joint engineering effort with Toshiba's electronics division, but would not reveal the financial details of that relationship. C-Cube expects to leverage the cost savings to drive the design into more mid-priced PCs. The chip uses 1.5W of power and was designed with the power constraints of the notebook PC in mind. But the configuration also is desktop friendly. Current Ziva-enabled notebooks are $4,000-plus priced systems from Toshiba and Gateway Inc. [GATE] With 400 MHz Pentium processors due out in the next few months, more mid-range desktop vendors are expected to jump on lower-cost software for DVD decoding. C-Cube is positioning the Ziva architecture at both the notebook and desktop markets to ensure the company gets a return on its engineering investment. Growing Market To date, less than 5 percent of Ziva units shipped have shown up in notebooks. Day, who recently joined C-Cube from his director of marketing post at Hyundai Electronics America, expects that market to increase significantly. He said over the next 12 months as much as 40 percent of the company's Ziva business could come from notebook design wins. The chip complies with key PC 98 specifications from Microsoft Corp. [MSFT] and also offers dual inputs for audio and video streams, a feature expected to be included in the PC 99 spec. Ziva PC also includes a glueless interface to graphics controllers from ATI Technologies Inc., S3 Inc. [SIII], Intel Corp. [INTC] and Nvidia Corp. To accelerate market adoption, C-Cube is making a PCI reference card called Cobra available to potential OEM customers. (C-Cube, 408/490-8000)