Boca Research Selects Zoran ZR36120 Chip for Desktop Video Conferencing Solution; Newest In Wave of Video Conferencing Design Wins

Business Wire, Nov 15, 1996

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 15, 1996--Zoran Corporation (NASDAQ:ZRAN), a leading global supplier of video and audio solutions for the PC and consumer markets, announced today that Boca Research has selected Zoran's ZR36120 PCI controller for their low cost Boca Video Phone Classic.

The board is selling for only $199 to end-users. The new Boca Video Phone is the industry's first video conferencing solution to use a DSP for G.723 audio compression using the H.324 POTS standard (Plain Old Telephone Service), while performing video compression functions in software.

This will enable manufacturers to offer high quality audio in their video conferencing solutions, even when using low power CPU's.

According to Zoran company officials, Boca is the most recent company to incorporate Zoran's ZR36120 PCI controller into its state-of-the-art desktop video conferencing solution. The solution is based on the EyeWay95 reference design and drivers developed by Zoran.

"We're pleased to add the Boca Phone Classic to our list of video conferencing design wins," noted Zoran's vice president of sales and marketing, Isaac Shenberg. "We believe the ZR36120, the various reference designs, and Zoran's Windows 95 software drivers which have been shipping for six months, will continue to enable manufacturers like Boca to significantly reduce time-to-market and to bring compatible video phones and Internet phones to mainstream PCs."

According to Boca Research's Video Products Manager, Gary Lemmons, Zoran's design expertise played a critical role in enabling Boca to be the first company to ship an advanced full G.723 audio video conferencing solution. The solution also uses the CT8020 audio DSP from DSP Group.

"By securing a competitive reference design and mature software drivers from Zoran early in our development process, we were able to complete our product and launch it before the competition," noted Lemmons.

From the development start, Zoran has worked intimately with a number of software companies that develops video conferencing applications, to optimize the overall system performance in H.324 and Internet communication. VDOnet corporation announced recently the VDOPhone software that provides the H.324 POTS standard as well as Internet conferencing with NetMeeting support.

VDOnet cooperated with Zoran to develop the Eyeway95 software architecture and the first to develop a full H.324 video conferencing application leveraging the video and audio capabilities of the Zoran's solution.

"We elected to support early on the Zoran Eyeway95 design because its DMA video transfer capability enabled us to provide a higher performance solution," said Asaf Mohr, President and CEO of VDOnet.

The VideoLink from Smith Micro Software is another recently announced H.324 application that takes advantage of the audio DSP's capabilities and also bundled with the Boca Video Phone.

"Smith Micro found it very helpful to work closely with Zoran and support the ZR36120 reference designs and software drivers with their video capture and audio compression functionality," said Dan Budge, General Manager of Smith Micro's Video Products Division. "The Zoran solutions enable us to demo our H.324 technology without requiring as high of a speed PC as our competition."

Zoran reports that its ZR36120 and software drivers have already been used by other partners of Zoran to develop additional reference designs.

In September, Analog devices announced their ADSP2181 based PCI board for video conferencing, called iCOM H.32X, developed jointly with MediaSonic. It is available now with an H.324 application and can be upgraded by software only to support LAN H.323 and ISDN H.320.

Mike Haidar, General Manager of Analog Devices Systems and Software explained that the design and software drivers developed by Zoran enabled Analog Devices to create its own competitive reference design for desktop video conferencing in a very short time.

"We believe the market is ready now for video conferencing architectures with audio compression in hardware and video in software, and the iCOM H.324 solution is what Analog Devices customers had been waiting for," stated Haidar.

For computer manufacturers that plan to rely on the power of a high speed CPU to execute the audio as well as video compression, in order to lower system costs, Zoran has developed a low cost reference design, the EyeWay95-Lite. It includes only video capture circuitry with components cost of less than $25 for OEMs.

The VDOPhone and VideoLink applications support this low cost solution, as well as many other software applications such as the LivePhone from PictureTel and CU-SeeMe from White Pine. The board is especially appealing for Internet conferencing and is already available from VideoLabs, MediaSonic, Digital Vision, and other manufacturers.

The Virgo PCI reference design, which was announced last month by Zoran and Silicon Vision, is another low cost video capture only solution. This two-chip board interfaces the PCI bus directly to the iVision digital camera. All the software applications mentioned above and any other Video For Windows applications are supported by the Virgo.