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To: Don Dorsey who wrote (41466)	5/24/1999 6:02:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Zoran's new DVD player chip............................... techweb.com May 24, 1999, Issue: 1062 Section: Semiconductors -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fourth-generation chip set also packs features for China market -- Zoran adds 54-Mips audio DSP to DVD silicon Junko Yoshida Santa Clara, Calif. - Zoran Corp. is rolling out its fourth-generation DVD decoder IC, the Vaddis IV, based on Zoran's proprietary 54-MHz audio DSP, an NTSC/PAL encoder, and expanded audio and video functions. It also comes packed with features tailored for use in the booming Chinese DVD market. "The new chip was designed to meet two basic requirements for next-generation DVD players: much lower system cost and higher performance," said Shmuel Farkash, vice president of marketing at Zoran, here. The NTSC/PAL encoder core and digital-to-analog converter can feed analog video and component S Video to a television set. Vaddis IV also incorporates a portion of the DVD front-end functions, such as a track buffer. In a conventional implementation, a separate memory is required for the track buffer to be driven by a DVD-ROM drive controller chip. In Vaddis IV, the local memory used for back-end DVD decoding is shared for the track buffer, now overseen by an on-chip memory controller. Expanded video functions inside the new chip include brightness and contrast controls, once available only in a high-end DVD player through the addition of an external controller chip. The chip also comes with enhanced on-screen display features including 32 colors and eight blending levels. Farkash said the 54-Mips DSP designed specifically for audio is what sets Vaddis IV head and shoulders above its competitors. In addition to 30 Mips for Dolby Digital decoding, the new chip has an 24 extra DSP Mips to handle a variety of audio decoding and post-processing features. These include MPEG 5.1, DTS, MP3, 3D-Audio, karaoke, MPEG-Audio and HDCD (High Definition Compatible Digital). While the on-chip audio DSP is fully capable of decoding the emerging MPEG-Audio's audio streams, the yet-to-be finalized encryption and watermarking decoding process associated with MPEG-Audio is most likely to be handled by a separate chip, Farkash said. HDCD is a patented process developed by Pacific Microsonics (Union City, Calif.) to increase dynamic audio range by encoding with 20 bits of real musical information, against 16 bits for standard CDs. Without using an external HDCD decoding/digital filtering ASIC, Zoran's Vaddis IV is capable of extracting embedded information in the extra bits to reproduce HDCD's increased dynamic range and resolution. Farkash said his company is "one of the largest DVD-player chip suppliers" on the consumer-electronics market, largely because of design wins with Toshiba Corp. Two other leading DVD players-designed and manufactured by Sony Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.-are using DVD decoder chips internally developed by their chip divisions. "Our chip is truly 'field-proven' with more than a million DVD players already on the market," Farkash added. According to Dataquest Inc., a market-research firm based in San Jose, Calif., the worldwide production of DVD players is expected to grow to 6 million units this year, up from 2.2 million units in 1998. By keeping an eye on the growing DVD market in China, Zoran's Vaddis IV supports multiple disk standards besides DVD, including China-specific Super VCD, VideoCD and DVCD. The DVCD is a double-density video CD, newly created in China, to cram a longer movie onto one disk by using a finer pitch size. The Vaddis IV chip, sampling today, will go into volume production in June. Manufactured using a 0.25-micron process at TSMC, it is priced below $17 in high volumes. Copyright ® 1999 CMP Media Inc.