The Hindu : National : High definition video in single chip

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Nov 06, 2006
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High definition video in single chip

Anand Parthasarathy

CREATORS: Ittiam's CEO Srini Rajam (extreme left) with some of the engineers who helped create the `Trinity' High Definition TV chip solution. (The full circuit board is held in front of the monitor)

Bangalore: Your bulbous 20 or 24-inch television set, your standard CD or DVD player, is set to become history. Come 2007, the world will move on — albeit in stages — to a new level of high definition (HD) video, where the picture is at least 6 times sharper, the sound seems to surround you from 5 or 7 separate speakers — and your entire video and audio entertainment experience moves to an all-digital era.

The challenge is to produce various HD bits and pieces — TV tuners, DVD players, multimedia set-top-boxes — faster, cheaper and smaller than ever before. And last week, a Bangalore-based leader in designing digital chips for media and communication, staked claim to being first off the starting gates, globally, with a one-size-fit-all, single-chip solution that kicks the `definition' of multiple video standards to a new ``high.''

Ittiam Systems announced the availability of all hardware and software know-how for realising what is called a ``High Definition Multi Format Video Decoder Engine'' as a system-on-a-chip, which means a single slab of silicon.

The Ittiam solution is known within the company as ``Trinity'' — because it can handle all three current and competing standards for high definition video — MPEG-2, VC1 and H.264. ``The challenge,'' explained Ittiam's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Srini Rajam during a privileged briefing for The Hindu , ``was to squeeze all the associated electronics into smallest possible area — while giving our customers, the freedom to create a variety of devices be they HD TV sets, HD DVD players or interactive set-top boxes using the same basic chip.''

Using the reference design board created to showcase Trinity and put it through its paces, Ittiam demonstrated a variety of high definition content on a 48-inch flat panel Liquid Crystal Display screen — the type of TV monitors that the relatively well-heeled in India are already buying up in significant numbers.

Trinity will enable DVD player-recorder manufacturers to turn out models for both competing disk types — Bluray and HD-DVD, Mr. Rajam explained.

Ittiam is not into manufacturing the actual chip (except in sample quantities for evaluation): it is a low-key but highly regarded player in the exclusive niche of semiconductor IP or intellectual property developers. In fact, for the last two years running the company has been rated the world's most preferred player in the business of digital

semi-conductor solutions, by market analysts Forward Concepts, who have just predicted that the HD video market is set to explode over the next three years.

Ittiam's engineers, who, in earlier years, have created the designs that fuel dozens of globally marketed digital media player and Internet videophone makes, are clearly betting that the launch of their high definition offering is nicely timed to ignite this expected explosion.

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