DTV Silicon Breaks Ground

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December 27, 1997 (11:38 AM EST)

Panasonic AVC American Laboratories, the North American digital-TV research facility of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., has developed a single-chip DTV video decoder. The chip is a key component in the DTV decoder set-top box that Panasonic is scheduled to premiere at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas early next month.

The chip handles the work performed by two video-decoder ASICs and one display processor in the HDTV chip set developed by the team of Mitsubishi Electric and Lucent Technologies. But Panasonic's chip goes one step further by simultaneously offering a down-conversion capability to translate all ATSC-specified video formats into 480i and 480p, while the Mitsubishi/Lucent chip set displays video only in 1080i and 720p for HDTV receivers.

Targeted for full-spec HDTVs and also in down-converter boxes or DTV add-in cards for PCs, the hard-wired silicon is the industry's first single-chip device that can decode and display ATSC-specified DTV signals in native video formats or in down-converted formats, said Sai Naimpally, vice president of Panasonic AVC American Labs and leader of its DTV development team. The chip decodes any MPEG-2 video bit streams, all the way up to MPEG-2 video Main-Profile @ High-Level. The same chip also acts as a video display processor and can display images in various raster formats, including 1080i, 720p, 480i and 480p.

The decoder offers a full-spec mode and a down-conversion mode. In full-spec mode, using 96 Mbits of Rambus DRAM, the chip decodes compressed video signals from a broadcast and outputs them in their original HD or SD formats.

For a complete DTV system, vendors will also need a VSB demodulator, an MPEG-2 transport demux chip, a Dolby Digital decoder and a triple D/A converter to build a full-spec HDTV, and an NTSC encoder to build a down-conversion box.

The single-chip digital-TV video decoder is fabricated using a 0.35-micron process. Though Panasonic will not comment on the price of the decoder, it is estimated the chip could cost twice as much as today's MPEG-2 decoders, or less than $100.