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To: DiViT who wrote (38945)	2/15/1999 3:59:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Frost & Sullivan report on Video Compression...................... newsalert.com February 15, 1999 14:47 -FROST & SULLIVAN: Video compression provides means to maximize potential growth strategies Jump to first matched term M2 PRESSWIRE-15 February 1999-FROST & SULLIVAN: Video compression provides means for industry leaders to maximize their potential growth strategies (C)1994-99 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD Mountain View, CA -- It seems like everywhere you look -- specially after the holidays -- individuals, companies, virtually everyone shares the same objective: To downsize. The same goes for video files. The huge file sizes generated by video necessitate the use of video compression tools to shrink the flies down to more manageable sizes. Any company desiring to be a market leader must recognize these trends and adapt their business strategy in order to maximize potential growth opportunities. World Video Compression Technologies Market, strategic research by Frost & Sullivan (www.frost.com) examines both the products and providers that make tip the market estimated at $177.3 million in 1998. In addition to giving detailed analysis of over four submarkets of the video compression products and providers, World Video Compression Technologies Market provides insight on the most pressing challenges addressing this growing industry. In a highly competitive market, companies may no longer rely on MPEG-1 procedures for encoders and decoders. Instead, the shift to MPEG-2 standards, which offers more flexible options, is imperative to industry survival. In addition, the encoders market is characterized by niche players and wide price points, while the decoders market is larger in size and scope. Companies must innovate or have their fate in the marketplace sealed. The study examines MPEG-related encoding and decoding products that enable video to be stored, created, and transmitted more efficiently. The study further subsegments encoders and decoders into their software and hardware alternatives. The competitive landscape for the encoding and decoding markets are relatively consolidated. This is especially so for the software space. Roughly a half-dozen companies comprise the bulk of the market for software encoders and only four companies account for 90% of the market for software decoders. Hardware vendors, on the other hand, are characterized by more players, but they tend to carve their own niches. Therefore, even within niches, the competition is sparse. As a result, vendors are able to stay afloat financially by generating enough revenues from their particular space. World Video Compression Technologies Market also contains an overview of the strategic market drivers, as well as the challenges facing companies within the video compression market. "Primary market drivers for the video compression market is the continued explosion of the Internet, as well as the development of streaming technology. Conversely, major challenges present themselves in respect to insufficient bandwidth and persistent patent issues," says Norvin Leong, Frost & Sullivan IT analyst. World Video Compression Technologies Market offers successful strategic suggestions on how to not only integrate changing technology, but also to stay ahead of the competition. Frost & Sullivan bestows Market Engineering awards to market participants to recognize companies that have worked hard to make a positive contribution to the industry. Winners are selected from an in-depth analysis of market competitors and interviews with those companies that make up the industry. Frost & Sullivan is pleased to announce FutureTel as the winner of the 1998 Market Engineering Leadership Award for its exhibition of world-class leadership in the video compression industry for being highly market oriented. In addition, the 1998 Marketing Engineering Competitive Strategy Award goes to Quadrant International. Quadrant International has been able to create and implement an effective competitive strategy integrating the strategic elements of product, price, marketing and sales. Optibase is the distinguished recipient of the 1998 Market Engineering Product Line Strategy Award for its ability to adopt new technology, develop a well-designed product family, and make significant contributions to the video compression market in terms of product performance. This IT industry study has integrated the proven Frost & Sullivan market engineering philosophy into the entire research process, which involved expert analysts in the IT markets. Critical phases of this research included: identification of industry challenges, market engineering measurements, strategic recommendations, planning and market monitoring. All of the vital elements of the this system help the market participants navigate successfully through the remote access hardware market. Frost & Sullivan is an international marketing consulting company that monitors the IT industry for market trends, market measurements, and strategies. The ongoing research is utilized to update a series of research publications such as #5846-74, Video Servers, and to support industry participants with customized consulting needs. Free executive summaries of all Frost & Sullivan reports are available to the press. Report: 5380-70 Price: $2950 CONTACT: Frost & Sullivan's Public Relations Department Tel: +44 (0)171 915 7824 Fax: +44 (0)171 730 3343 e-mail: kristina.menzefricke@fs-europe.com WWW: frost.com M2 COMMUNICATIONS DISCLAIMS ALL LIABILITY FOR INFORMATION PROVIDED WITHIN M2 PRESSWIRE. DATA SUPPLIED BY NAMED PARTY/PARTIES.

To: DiViT who wrote (38945)	2/17/1999 2:33:00 PM
From: BillyG	Respond to of 50808

ISSCC: Broadband consumer apps will drive silicon, keynoters say eetimes.com By Rick Boyd-Merritt EE Times (02/12/99, 11:34 a.m. EDT) SAN FRANCISCO — The merger of consumer electronics and broadband networking will drive semiconductor technology in the next decade, keynoters will tell the International Solid State Circuit Conference this month. They will articulate the new religion of what is increasingly seen as a post-PC world in which Mips, megahertz and data processing take a back seat to multimedia applications and new ways of measuring progress in silicon. In the first of three ISSCC keynotes, Haruo Nakatsuka, vice president and chief research officer of Toshiba Corp. (Kawasaki, Japan), will sketch out the image of a home server in 2003 that leverages deep-submicron process technology to blend digital television, 3-D graphics and interactive services. Such a system will need 0.15-micron technology to craft a highly parallel chip that processes 50 million polygons/second and runs at 2 GHz to handle MPEG-4 processing of Internet, telephone and TV data streams. Pointing the way to such silicon, Toshiba and Sony Computer Entertainment jointly will detail a 128-bit processor with 10 floating point multiply-accumulators and four floating-point divider units built in a 0.18-micron process. The chip, which supports MPEG-2 decoding, is believed to be a central part of a next-generation Sony Playstation that could merge high-end 3-D with DVD-based games. "It would be a big thing to bring DVD-quality video to a game," said Peter Glaskowsky, senior analyst for 3-D graphics and multimedia at the Microprocessor Report. It's not yet clear how the Toshiba chip would compare with its closest competitor, Hitachi SH-4 used in the CD-ROM-based Sega Dreamcast video console, which processes about 2 million polygons/second, he said. Fueling the post-PC fervor, Theo Claasen, chief technology officer of Philips Semiconductors (Eindhoven, Netherlands) will argue for a new way to benchmark silicon for a future world in which telephone and video services are readily delivered over both the Internet and cellular systems and DVD is a mass-market product. Signal-processing, measured in millions of operations/W will be the metric for tomorrow's media processors, rather than Mips or megahertz touted in today's data-processing chips. "Design aiming at optimum speed rather than maximum speed is the ultimate art of digital design," Claasen writes. In the last of three keynotes, Henry Samueli, chief technology officer of Broadcom Corp. (Irvine, Calif.), will come to grips with an increasingly fragmented landscape of emerging broadband networks from cable modems and Gigabit Ethernet to HDTV and digital subscriber lines. Samueli's vision of these evolving networks is primarily upbeat, forecasting — among other things — the emergence of a single-chip processor for a high end set-top box using 0.18 micron technology. But the cofounder of Broadcom also sees significant design challenges, chiefly in mixed-signal design for integrated system chips that drive these new networks. As digital CMOS parts push toward lower voltages and power dissipation they will increasingly cramp even the most sophisticated analog designs, he warns.