Components

Components provided to OEMs

Silicon Image: HDMI First To Computers
Silicon Image has introduced its new Sil 1390 and 1920 transmitters, chip-based platforms capable of transmitting Intel’s SDVO (Serial Digital Video Output) and HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface), respectively.
HDMI is being pushed by the content industry as the ‘upgrade’ of DVI (Digital Visual Interface). Sure, HDMI offer a few more features, like integrating eight-channel Audio and HD Video carried on a single cable, and acting as a conduit to pass remote control signals around, but the main reason for enthusiastic support is HDCP.
In this ever expanding lexicon, why is HDCP important? High-Definition Content Protection keeps digital video and audio encrypted through out the digital distribution chain, up to the point it hits your eyeballs and ears. This is to stop the naughty people that might want to save the content they’re paying for (heaven forbid).
Capitalising on growing sales of Media Center PCs and the growing availability of High Definition content for PC platforms, Silicon Image’s new series of HDMI transmitters targeted at PCs are the first integrated solution designed to interface directly to the video and audio interfaces of PC platforms. Out of interest, Silicon Image is one of the founders of the HDMI standard.
Silicon Image has also introduced the SiI 1368, billed as (take a deep breath, folks) the industry’s first Digital Visual Interface High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (DVI-HDCP) transmitter designed for PCI-Express graphics chipsets supporting Intel’s Serial Digital Video Output (SDVO) interface.
All three transmitters support the full 25-165 MHz HDMI and DVI bandwidth. The SiI 1390 and SiI 1930 transmitters also support a wide variety of audio interfaces-including HD-Audio, SPDIF and three I2S channels-to ensure compatibility with a broad range of PC audio hardware platforms.
“As PC users gain access to HD content, secure content delivery on PC platforms will be an important issue,” said Neerav Shah, president of Digital Content Protection, LLC, the licensor of HDCP.
“HDCP already has the support of content providers in the consumer electronics market and has emerged as an important technology in enabling consumers to access HD content.
We expect HDCP will similarly become a requirement on PC platforms capable of receiving and playing HD content. As a contributor to the HDCP specification and having developed HDCP test protocols for its PanelLink Cinema Partners test center, Silicon Image can help enable PC platforms to access the growing volume of HD content.
With the availability of new HD content and the popularity of Microsoft’s Windows Media Center Edition (with integrated HDTV support), the market for entertainment PCs is projected to grow from 7.9 million in 2004 to 59 million in 2008.
You may think, “what do we need another effing’ cable for?” but with more HD content becoming available, the PC market will require PCs to support HDMI or DVI with HDCP in order to access this content.
With its single cable coupling multi-channel audio and uncompressed HD video and small connector, HDMI is poised to become the de facto multimedia interface for both PCs and consumer electronics devices-enabling PCs with true entertainment and multimedia functionality.
“All the signs indicate that 2005 will mark the year HDMI gains a foothold in PC platforms,” stated Joe Lee, Silicon Image director of product marketing, PC and display products.
“Our family of new HDMI products for the PC supports our corporate strategy of enabling secure delivery of digital content on any and all platforms, including Windows Media Center and other Intel architected desktop PCs, notebooks, set-top boxes and media adapters.”
Silicon Image, HDMI Standards
Silicon Image Press Release
hdmi.org
3 March, 2005
Hitachi To Boost Output Of Small Hard-Disk Drives
Hitachi has announced that it will ramp up its output of consumer hard drives this year as it strives to take advantage of the soaring storage demands of MP3, PVR and mobile phone markets.
The move, in response to faltering enterprise demand, will see Hitachi target three key consumer segments – MP3/personal media players, digital video recorders and mobile phones.
As part of its strategy for the consumer market in 2005, Hitachi will open five Hitachi Design Studios worldwide, each one specialising in helping partners to integrate hard drives into consumer electronic devices.
The new centres – called the Hitachi Design Studios – will be scattered all over the globe (Fujisawa, Japan; Havant, UK; Rochester, Minnesota; Shenzhen, China and Taipei, Taiwan) and will open for business in April.
Hitachi intends to thrash their workers to an inch of their lives and get them to treble their output of 1.8-inch drives (used in Dell DJ music players), and double the production of 1-inch drives, as used in Apple’s iPod mini.
A smaller version of the current 1-inch drive, code-named Mikey, comes out later this year, with capacious 2.5-inch drives – holding up to 500GB – being targeted at makers of DVRs and home servers.
Hitachi, the world’s second-largest maker of hard disk drives after Seagate, shipped 1.3 million 1.8-inch drives and 3.9 million 1-inch drives in 2004, although posted an operating loss of 4.4 billion yen (US$42.08m/€32.06m/£22.02m) in calendar 2004, after being battered by sharp price declines.
“Hitachi`s strength in hard drives provides a strong basis from which to accelerate our CE [consumer electronics] business in 2005,” said Bill Healy, senior vice president, product strategy and marketing, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.
“Hitachi’s intensified focus in the CE segment hard drive will mean good news for end-users as we work on developing smaller, high-capacity hard drives that are more rugged, require less power and cost less.”
Hitachi’s promise of churning out smaller, cheaper, more capacious hard drives may impact on a whole host of consumer electronic devices, with its high capacity drives offering bags more storage space for video/DVD convergence units.
Hitachi
2 March, 2005
Frontier Silicon Raises $28m For DAB And Mobile TV Chip Tech
Frontier Silicon, the British company that makes chips for mobile digital television and digital radio products, has completed it US$28 million (€21m/£14.5m) investment round funding.
Irish venture capital firm ACT led the US$28 million investment in Frontier Silicon, with other participants in the venture funding round being Apax Partners, AltaBerkeley Venture Partners, Quilvest and Bluerun Ventures (formerly known as Nokia Venture Partners).
Frontier Silicon has developed two new products, the Apollo chip and Kino chip, which allow mobile phones to receive and record television programmes on their mobile phones, electronic organisers or MP3 players.
Anthony Sethill, founder and chief executive of Frontier Silicon, said that the money raised would be used for product development and marketing purposes.
He boldly predicted that half of all mobile phones would be capable of receiving television programmes within a year or so at an additional cost to the user of under $50 (€37/£26).
Frontier Silicon currently employs 60 people between its English, Hong Kong and Chinese operations and boasted a turnover of more than $30 million (€22.7m/£15.6m) in 2004.
“This latest investment allows us to aggressively target and drive market share in the emerging mobile digital television market in the same way that we have established our chips in over 70 percent of DAB digital radios,” said Anthony Sethill.
Frontier Silicon produces chips for DAB digital radios, with its customers including such industry heavyweights as Bang & Olufsen, Grundig, Hitachi, Philips and Samsung.
The company also delivered the world’s first complete system-on-chip designs for DAB digital radio as well as the world’s first Combined Digital TV and Radio Chip.
Frontier Silicon
1 March, 2005
Smartball May Help Football Goal Decisions
The International Football Association Board has agreed to trial microchip technology, which can determine whether a ball has crossed the goal line.
Football’s law-making body, comprising the four British associations and four members of world soccer’s governing body FIFA, has authorised FIFA to experiment with the system at the world under-17 soccer championships in Peru, from 16 September to 2 October, 2005.
FIFA president Sepp Blatter, a strong opponent of video evidence in matches, welcomed the experiment while remaining adamant that it was not the first step on the road to introducing video replays being viewed by a fourth official.
“The board have tried to keep football with a human face and the possible errors and the only technology where the board has said yes is for goal-line technology,” Blatter said. “Now for the World Cup 2006 such a system could and should be applied when and if the results of our test are conclusive.”
Known as the “Smartball” system, the technology involves placing a microchip sensor in a ball which sends a signal to the referee whenever the ball crosses the goal line
Developed by Adidas, together with German company Cairos AG and the German Fraunhofer Institute, the Board agreed to the trial after a successful test run between Nuremburg and Nuremburg Reserves near Adidas’s headquarters.
Adidas spokesman Thomas van Schaik explained: “We are convinced in the quality of the system but we have to prove the 100 per cent accuracy of it, so that the entire football family is convinced. If not, we should not rush things.”
Goal line disputes have formed the basis of many a pub argument, with the most famous being the Geoff Hurst goal in the 1966 World Cup final – despite endless replays and lengthy analysis, it’s still impossible to be sure that the ball crossed the line.
More recently, the highly publicised Spurs ‘goal’ at Manchester United has brought the issue to the fore. Despite it being apparent to half the world and his wife that the ball had crossed the line by a metre, the referee waved play on.
Although a video replay system (like that used at cricket and rugby) would have made it abundantly obvious that the goal should have been given, football has long resisted the technology, with both fans and the governing bodies expressing the fear that it would slow the pace of the game and damage the spectacle of the sport.
Football hasn’t resisted all technological advances though, and referees currently employ a special armband, which vibrates when the linesman (or referee’s assistant, as they are more commonly known) raises his flag to signal that a player is in an offside position.
The flag and armband communicate by radio, ensuring that the referee won’t have to miss any of the action when looking for the linesman’s signals.
Although some football traditionalists will be frothing into their real ale at the prospect of new-fangled, electronic wizardly playing a part in the Beautiful Game, such innovation seems inevitable in the increasingly corporate world of international football where huge investments can hang on the balance of referee’s decisions.
International Football Association Board
FIFA
Adidas
28 February, 2005
Sandisk Announce Clever USB Enabled SD Memory Card
SanDisk today introduced the less-than-snappily entitled SanDisk Ultra(TM) II SD(TM) PLUS, an innovative SD flash memory card with built-in USB connectivity.
The card has a built-in USB connector for instant connectivity – users can flip the card to expose the USB connector and then plug it into any USB port and watch the blinking LED do its thang as the data is transferred.
The neat folding design eliminates the need for an easily-lost cap too.
This dual functionality could prove to be an alluring selling point, as consumers wanting to download images to their computer currently have to invest in external card readers or mess about with a connecting cable.
Travellers will find the twin functionality particularly handy, with the USB connection making it easy to download their holiday snaps onto cyber-café computers and mail them off to jealous chums back home.
The Ultra II SD PLUS is targeted primarily at the professional digital camera and prosumer market where 4 mega-pixel or higher resolution digital cameras are requiring significantly faster flash memory film cards.
It’s quite a nippy card too, offering a respectable write speed of 9-megabytes per second (MB/Sec) and a 10MB/sec read speed.
SanDisk expects the card to initially be available in two capacities with the 512MB card having a suggested retail price of $109.99 (£58, €84) and the 1GB version carrying a suggested price of $149.99 (£79, €115)
Shipping to stores is expected in April. We might even be tempted.
SanDisk
21 February, 2005
New PlayStation3 Cell Processor to be Revealed
The details of the Cell processor chip designed to power Sony’s PlayStation 3 console will be released in San Francisco today.
The result of a devilish melding of the minds of industry giants, Sony, IBM and Toshiba, the chip has taken three years to develop and is reported to be up to 10 times faster than current processors.
Triumphantly billed as a “supercomputer on a chip”, advance reports suggest that this beast of a processor is significantly more powerful and versatile than the next generation of micro-processors announced by their competitors, Intel and AMD.
Utilising several different processing cores that work on tasks together, the chip has been fine-tuned to be able to handle the detailed graphics common in games and the data-chewing demands of films and broadband media.
The Cell’s architecture is described as scalable from “small consumer devices to massive supercomputers” and when installed inside powerful computer servers, is expected to be capable of handling a breathtaking 16 trillion floating point operations, or calculations, every second. Phew!
IBM will start producing the chip in early 2005 at manufacturing plants in the US, with computer workstations and servers being the first machines off the line sporting the Cell processor.
A working version of the PS3 is expected to be previewed in May 2005 but the full launch of the next generation console is not expected to start until 2006.
High-definition TVs from Sony and Toshiba, a Sony home server for broadband content and the PlayStation 3 all featuring Cell are also due to appear in 2006.
“This is probably going to be one of the biggest industry announcements in many years,” boasts Richard Doherty, president of the Envisioneering research firm. “It’s going to breathe new life into the industry and trigger fresh competition.”
But it’s not all pat-on-the-back stuff with rivals publicly questioning whether Cell’s potential can be realised – while they hastily get to work on alternative multi-tasking methods.
IBM, Sony, Toshiba to reveal ‘superbrain chip’ (ft.com)
PS3 Portal News
PS3Land.com
PlayStation 3: The next generation (CNet)
PlayStation 3 chip to be unveiled (BBCt)
7 February, 2005
$100 PC Touted by Negroponte for Developing World
A $100 (€76, £53) laptop computer for the developing world has been touted at the World Economic Forum in Davos by Nicholas Negroponte, founding chairman of MIT’s Media Lab.
The computer will have a 14-inch color screen and will run the Linux operating system. According to Red Herring magazine, Negroponte is looking for support from companies such as chip giant AMD, Google, Motorola, Samsung, and News Corporation.
The first units could be ready in about 18 months, Red Herring said.
The developing world is increasingly a target of technology companies – Microsoft has built a slimmed-down version of Windows XP for the Indian, Malaysian, Indonesian and Russian markets, as part of its Windows XP Starter Edition pilot programme. In part this reflects its desire to fight off Linux, which is becoming increasingly popular in these new markets.
Another source of PCs for the developing world is recycling. Every year in the UK 3 million PCs taken out of service, but many are still in good working order. In contrast most schoolchildren in the developing world graduate from high school not having seen a computer in the classroom, and there are a number of charities which take these PCs and reuse them in the developing world.
In related news, MIT has announced that Media Lab Europe, launched in 2000 by the Irish government and MIT will close on February 1 due to a shortfall in financing.
MIT
Red Herring
31 January, 2005
Wireless Headphones Possible with Aura’s NFC LibertyLink LL888
Aura Communications has announced the first samples of its LibertyLink LL888 system-on-chip, for enabling high-quality wireless voice and stereo audio. The chip provides wireless stereo headphone capability for MP3 players, portable DVD players and audio-capable mobile phones – or indeed virtually any portable product where digital audio performance must be coupled with long battery life and low cost. The technology was previewed in ‘real life’ earlier his year by Creative Technology, whose wireless-enabled Zen Micro MP3 player is based on the LibertyLink LL888 chip.
The most interesting feature of the LibertyLink LL888 is that it uses a patented form of Near Field Communication (NFC) rather than conventional radio frequency technology (such as Bluetooth) to enable digital audio wireless performance. NFC is a short-range wireless connectivity standard that uses magnetic field induction to enable communication between devices when they’re touched together, or brought within a few centimetres of each other.
Jointly developed by Philips and Sony, the standard specifies a way for the devices to establish a peer-to-peer (P2P) network to exchange data. After the P2P network has been configured, another wireless communication technology, such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, can be used for longer range communication or for transferring larger amounts of data.
Unlike Bluetooth, which radiates in the crowded frequency band at 2.4GHz, Aura’s technology is more private and secure as it operates at 13.5MHz – it completely avoids the interference of the 2.4GHz band. Aura Communications claims that the chip’s magnetic signals creates a ‘secure communication bubble that surrounds the user and is uniquely owned by each user for reliable and private communications.
The chip is currently scheduled for production quantity availability by the second quarter of 2005, with pricing set on an individual customer basis, but expected to be under $5 (US) in OEM quantities.
Aura Communications
26 January, 2005
China Develops its First Digital TV Chip
Shanghai-based Fudan University has developed the country’s first home-made digital TV chip. Not only that, but the chip has passed appraisals by experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering, and it’s outperformed European and US standards in terms of sensitivity and anti-jamming capacities – at lower costs.
The ‘Zhongshi No.1’ chip, which is based on China’s DMB-T standard and is made by Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing and Semiconductor Manufacturing International, integrates more than 70 storages, 2 million logic gates and 20 million transistors. It’s expected that the mass production of the cost-effective chip will help to boost China’s digital TV industry as it will pave the way to a new generation of high-definition televisions (HDTV).
Apparently, dozens of electronics makers have integrated the new chip technology into their products, including Changhong, TCL, Skyworth and Haier. China’s Henan Province has applied the new technology to launch mobile TV programs, and other localities have reported success in trial operations. US-based Time Warner has also announced that it plans to offer subscription-based digital TV programs to China.
According to official statistics, China has more than 370 million TV sets and an average 40 million sets are being sold each year. China plans to broadcast the 2008 Beijing Olympics on digital TV and hopes to roll out the service nationwide by 2015.
25 January, 2005
TI Announce Single-Chip Mobile Phones
Texas Instruments (TI) has announced they will bring a integrated single-chip solution for mobile phones.
Based on TI’s Digital RF Processor (DRP), it integrates two basic chips, one that controls sending and receiving radio frequencies, and one that controls basic computing functions.
It will bring the advantages of lowering the cost, size and power requirements, while raising performance. All of these are vital in producing high-volume, entry-level cellular phones, particularly when selling into high-growth regions such as India and China.
Currently half of TI wireless business is not that it’s news to them. Back in 2002 TI announced its intention to integrate the bulk of handset electronics on a single chip, for delivery in 2004. It squeezed in to 2004 by providing samples in December 2004.
The NY Times is reporting that Qualcomm announced (reg. reqd) it had developed integrated technology back in November, but it is unlikely to reach the mass market before TI’s. Clearly TI is excited about it, Bill Krenik, manager of wireless advanced architectures for Texas Instruments said to the NY Times, “This isn’t an incremental step, it’s a big leap forward.”
Juha Pinomaa, Vice President, Entry Business Line, Nokia is equally sprightly. “By incorporating TI’s DRP technology into a single chip, future Nokia mobile phones will provide the ideal mix of cool features and cost-effectiveness, making them more attractive to the mass marketplace.”
Not resting on its laurels, TI’s integrated wireless technology roadmap also includes a single chip solution for digital TV for mobile phones, as well as future single chip solutions for GPS, wireless LAN and UMTS.
TI Nokia

Image source – The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

24 January, 2005