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By Junko Yoshida
MILPITAS, CALIF. — Now that cutting-edge consumer equipment has become
the primary theater of operations for chip companies armed with MPEG and Dolby Digital encoders, the battle for market share is growing so cutthroat that tags are being slashed even
on the newest market entries, according to some industry observers.Unlike the conventional market for MPEG-2 audio/video decoding chips, the emerging MPEG-2 encoding IC
market is dominated by the in-house semiconductor divisions of leading Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers, led by Sony and Matsushita. C-Cube Microsystems and a handful of
other U.S. chip companies are seeking to leverage their lead in broadcast encoding to move downstream into the consumer encoding market. For audio encoding, prevalent
chip solutions include Texas Instruments Inc.'s C54X audio digital signal processor and Motorola Inc.'s DSP56362. Dolby Laboratories recently granted Dolby Digital Consumer Encoder
certification to Motorola's chip, making it easier for system designers to design next-generation DVD recordable products using Dolby Digital's two-channel encoder technology. While many in the consumer electronics industry are determined to move to the MPEG-2 encoding scheme for time-shifting consumer devices, some companies, such as  (Netanya, Israel), disagree.  has argued that jumping onto MPEG-2 encoding now might not be the wisest choice for system
vendors, especially for PC add-in card companies looking for the best price/performance solutions for TV tuner cards. recently designed an MPEG-1 video encoding chip called the Z1011. Add-in card vendors "should give serious
consideration to MPEG-1 encoding solutions, because the chip is much cheaper, requires less memory, produces acceptable picture quality and, most of all, gives them
a better margin compared with solutions based on slow-to-emerge MPEG-2 encoders,"  
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It is unclear how the recent earthquake in Taiwan will affect the supply of upcoming MPEG
encodingchips, either from C-Cube or  , since both companies depend for
production of their chips on Taiwanese fabs.  , however,
noted that he expects the quake's impact on his company's business to be minimal because its foundry, Winbond Electronics, is more than a fab partner: The two companies developed the chip together and are sharing the profits. "We designed the
chip at  Winbond did the placement and routing, we
then did the timing verification and they are now building the chip. We are real partners in every sense," 
C-Cube claims its MPEG-2 video encode/decode chip,
DVxplore, has been making deep inroads into the consumer market as a crucial engine for new classes of digital devices. C-Cube secured a design slot in NEC Corp.'s GigaStation digital
optical video recorder, based on the Japanese company's proprietary Multimedia Video Disc (MVDisc) format. Additional notches in the C-Cube gun are ATI Technologies Inc.'s
ATI-Video Wonder add-in-board, designed to turn a PC into a digital VCR, and JVC's new-generation D-VHS. The chip vendor also worked with South Korea's Samsung to develop a
DVD-RAM-based recorder that was demonstrated in Seoul this week at the Korean Electronics Show. Tim Vehling, director of marketing at C-Cube's PC/Consumer Codec Division,
claimed that among all the MPEG-2 video encoding solutions available on the market today, "Nobody has been able to match the feature set of our DVxplore." The
Sparc-based, real-time-capable programmable MPEG-2 video codec can also transcode DV digital video streams to MPEG-2 video streams on the fly. Using C-Cube's DVxplore
features, both NEC's GigaStation and ATI's Video Wonder add-in card offer frame-accurate editing features in addition to time-shifting capabilities. JVC's D-VHS and NEC's
optical-storage solutions also provide an interface to link their systems with a DV-format digital video camcorder, allowing the transcoding of video streams from the DV camera to
MPEG-2 video streams to |
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extend recording time and enhance picture quality.Key silicon components of the
DVD recorder prototype Samsung showed at the Korean Electronics Show were C-Cube's DVxplore MPEG-2 codec, C-Cube's ZiVA-3 DVD playback chip and TI's 54X DSP.
Real-time stream DVxplore encodes the
incoming video stream in MPEG-2; TI's audio DSP provides audio encoding. DVxplore then performs AV synchronization and multiplexing, and generates a real-time read/write stream
compliant with the DVD Forum's DVD specification for Video Recording (DVD-VR). ZiVA-3 is used for DVD audio/video playback and is capable of a wide array of playback
trick modes. It offers Dolby Digital/Pro-Logic audio decoding, DTS digital output, DVD navigation, content scrambling system (CSS) and karaoke capabilities. In turning
its DVD player into a DVD recorder, "Samsung's engineers didn't need to redo any software development, because they already use the ZiVA chip in their current line of DVD
players," said Vehling. The prototype DVD recorder allocates 8 Mbytes of DRAM to MPEG-2 encoding and 4 Mbytes of DRAM to MPEG-2 decoding. System memory requirements
would range up to 8 Mbytes, according to Vehling.  meanwhile,
said his company's reference design for a PC-TV tuner for time-shifting applications is fairly straightforward.    The card comes with a USB controller. A TV tuner
module, video decoder and audio A/D converter would need to be added to the tuner card.
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  while TI's
DSP performs MPEG-1 audio encoding, A/V synchronization and multiplexing,   For playback, a PC
using P133 is sufficient for real-time audio/video decoding on the host processor.
'Forward pricing' It is unclear how much
"forward pricing" chip vendors must do with encoding solutions today, as they vie for big design wins in price-sensitive consumer products. C-Cube's DVxplore,
when it was originally announced last year, was priced at $75 per unit. Vehling, however, declined to provide the current price, saying prices vary with volume.
A case in point is ATI's Video Wonder add-in board. Though the board uses C-Cube's supposedly $75 solution, its suggested retail price, according to ATI, is only $199. 
Through partnerships with Winbond and Singapore-based Serial Systems, the company hopes to tap the huge Video CD
market by leveraging its MPEG-1 video encoding chip. "The Video CD in China is not going away. We expect that 20 to 30 percent of the Video CD player market in China will
switch to Video CD recorders,"
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