Steve,
The DVD market is positioned to be taken off. What's your take on ESS's readiness to take on this market?
R.
-----
(from C-Cube post)
Market warms to DVD STMicroelectronics STi5500 chip; ZiVA-PC chip
Electronics Times
DVD volumes are ramping up and the chip market is fierce. The digital versatile disc is
here at last, says Steve Homer
DVD is finally taking off in two quite distinct sectors. The technology originally known
as digital video disc but now re-christened digital versatile disc is starting to forge ahead
in both the consumer electronics and the computer markets. But internationally, the
distribution of these two sectors is vastly different.
"Volumes are ramping up now," said Christophe Hubert, marketing manager for
STMicroelectronics (ST). "For 1998, the indications are that the total worldwide
market for DVD players will be around 1.2 million units. Roughly, half in North
America, around 200,000 in Europe and the rest in the Asia-Pacific region and China."
China's position is certainly one to watch. The Chinese are already deemed as
potentially massive DVD purchasers based on their interest in video CDs. This market
in China is huge with 15 to 20 million units sold this year, according to Hubert.
And Video CD is the MPEG1 precursor of DVD, even though it never managed to
take off in Europe or the US due to its capacity, which could store only 74min of video.
But Video CD is phenomenally successful in many Asian countries. These sales will
rapidly be replaced by DVD players.
"China could take over from the US as the lead DVD country as early as next year,"
said Hubert.
Video CD has done well because the technology is not much more complicated than
CD audio. But then neither is DVD.
"The silicon is much more complex but that will rapidly come down in price. What will
remain expensive are the royalties you have to pay to various parties," said Hubert.
Given China's poor history on honouring intellectual property matters, this may not be a
hurdle in the world's largest DVD market!
But worldwide, the DVD chip market is fierce: "It is very, very competitive. It is more
competitive even than the set-top box (STB) market. All the Japanese companies are
very active {in this area}."
ST is addressing the market with its STi5500 chip, originally designed for the STB
market: "The back-end functions of a DVD player are relatively similar to the back-end
of an STB." And ST is familiar with this market; it launched its first MPEG2 decoder in
1993.
But profits will be hard to come by. DVD is a mass market product and needs a mass
market approach to chip production and marketing. The STi5500 integrates the host
processor and Pal/NTSC decoder along with the MPEG2 decoder.
But Hubert expects ST to offer an integrated back-end - decoding the video and audio
and handling the navigation data and so forth - to be available before the end of next
year. He is confident ST can do it, but not sure about the competitors: "Some of our
competitors are not so advanced."
The front-end functions - the data acquisition from the disc, some buffering, error
correction, control of the drive and so forth - should also be integrated into one device
by the end of next year. Ultimately, there will be a single integrated device for the front
and back-ends, and that Hubert believes is likely to be available some time in 2000 or
2001.
In the meantime, ST is working on a specialist DVD chip, with samples available around
the end of this year. It is believed that a fair degree of back-end integration will be
on-board.
For the PC sector, the company to beat is C-Cube. Based in Milpitas,
California, the company has been involved in compression technology for years.
Chris Day, director for PC marketing, said: "DVD on the PC is finally starting
to take off. Sales of DVD-rom drives have been held back by four factors: the
price of the drives themselves have been too high; the price of MPEG2
decoding hardware has been too high; those that decided they wanted to go the
software decoding route have been waiting for a 400 MHz Pentium II processor
to have enough power; and finally the content has simply not been compelling
enough.
"All these factors now seem to be turning the corner and there is a real
buoyancy coming into the market. The major OEMs are placing large orders
for DVD drives for the back end of the year."
This means that the market for specialised PC DVD chips is taking off too.
"In the past, when there were no specialised DVD chips for the PC, companies
would use a consumer electronic DVD chip," said Day. "But they needed to
interface this to a PCI bridge chip to connect to the bus. They also required glue
logic to connect into the graphics chip, as the chip would be designed for
Pal/NTSC operation. On top of that, they would need four or five EDO ram
chips.
"Our current single-chip solution, ZiVA-PC released in May, simplifies that
configuration. With ZiVA-PC, OEMs only need one ZiVA-PC chip and a single
SDRAM chip. We designed the product in collaboration with [ Toshiba ] 's
notebook division in Japan, and it is the only PC-specific chip on the market at
the moment."
This chip offers all sorts of extras. The moving video can be magnified by up to
four times and the user can then roam around the image. The chip processes all
of the frames of the video stream, which gives very smooth rewind and fast
forward. And colour correction has been simplified.
"We have built that on to the chip," said Day. "True, you could modify colour
settings on the PC before, but that meant the user getting deep inside the
machine and changing the setting on the graphics chip. That was often
complicated and users don't want anything complicated. With our chip, they can
simply change the contrast, brightness and colour of the video window itself and
leave everything else the same."
By the end of the year, C-Cube is expected to introduce a chip that will be an
MPEG2 encoder and DVD decoder. This is currently know as 2Real.
"We see this chip as fundamentally changing the PC," said Day. "A the
moment, the PC is mainly involved with plain text and simple graphics. Real life
is about moving pictures and sounds. We believe our low-cost codec will allow
everyone to get involved with video capture and we will all become better
connected and more creative.
"We haven't said what the price will be, but we have said the chip is designed
as a component for a sub-$1000 PC."
After that? "Well, we can't tell you much. It is no secret that we are working on
high-definition TV (HDTV) and next-generation encoding solutions and that will
be usable here in Europe. All our processors are programmable using
microcode, enabling C-Cube to do things like switch the chip to work in different
regions."
So the chip could operate with digital HDTV broadcasts in the US and DVB
broadcasts in Europe. It was a long time coming but it looks like convergence is
finally here.
(Copyright 1998) |
