Consumers to benefit from Philips DVD-recording chip

Royal Philips Electronics have announced the launch of a single chip MPEG2 CODEC, which will enable DVD manufacturers to quickly develop DVD-recorders.
The pnx7100 is a single-chip Audio, Video, and Graphics (AVG) MPEG2 CODEC targeted for laser disk or hard disk-based digital recording systems. Offering the highest level of integration in the industry, as well as comprehensive software support, the pnx7100 will allow manufacturers to develop digital video recorders at a faster rate – cutting the manufacturers' development cycle by 35 percent, while meeting the required high-volume consumer price points.
"DVD recorders are expected to hit the big-time as falling prices bring them in touching distance of regular play-only devices," said Peter King, Director of Broadband Device Strategies at Strategy Analytics.
Mr King said that he expected worldwide demand for (TV set-top) DVD recorders this year to reach 1.3 million units, and then 3.8 million in 2003, rising to 10.1 million in 2005.
Jeroen Keunen, Head of Consumer and Multimedia with Philips Semiconductors in Asia Pacific, said: "The pnx7100 chip offers a total solution to manufacturers of DVD recorders.
"Until now, DVD recorder manufacturers have needed to use a separate MPEG2 encoder, separate MPEG2 decoder, sometimes even a separate chip to do transcoding from DV-to-MPEG2 format, and separate memory for each of these chips. Now, with the introduction of this new chip, all of these features are contained on one chip, which greatly reduces the bill of material and speeds up the development cycle."
To facilitate availability, the pnx7100 chip is supported by the industry standard DVD+RW software stack. The chip is a third-generation solution for the DVD-Recordable market with both Playback and Recording functions being derived from best in class software solutions already in the market. By providing maximum compatibility with existing DVD-Video and DVD-ROM equipment, the product allows for media interchange between consumer electronic equipment and PC platforms. Both home-recorded and pre-recorded disks can be played on the same equipment.
The pnx7100 chip can support multiple digital video-recording standards including DVD+RW or Hard-Disk PVR (Personal Video Recorder). The chip includes a high-performance MIPS CPU core, and is based on Philips' Nexperia platform. It has a unified memory architecture that allows the MPEG subsystems, graphics and CPU to share the external SDRAM. External memory mapped peripherals can be connected to the PCI-XIO bus interface.
Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands is one of the world's biggest electronics companies and Europe's largest, with sales of €32.3 billion in 2001.
Royal Philips Electronics, www.philips.com
(GMcG)