Philips Semiconductors and Zayante Extend HAVi Partnership

Electronic News, April 17, 2000 by Jerry Ascierto

Philips Semiconductors, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, has extended its partnership with Zayante, Scotts Valley, Calif., a provider of 1394 home networking silicon and software products and services, to bundle Zayante's TNF or Thirteen Ninety-Four (IEEE 1394) software with its HAVi-based technology. The combined offering would bring both the 1394 plug-and-play capability and device interoperability to consumer electronics products. An open architecture developed by eight consumer electronics companies (Grundig, Hitachi, Matsushita, Royal Philips Electronics, Sharp, Sony, Thomson Multimedia, and Toshiba), the HAVi, or Home Audio-Video Interoperability, 1.0 specification was designed to allow consumer electronics, PCs, and other devices in the home to interconnect and interoperate. Written in ANSI 'C' and designed for embedded systems, the Philips Semiconductors/Zayante technology will soon be available for all major Real Time Operating Systems and common embedded processors, the companies said. The product supports all classes of HAVi devices, including the "Full A/V device (FAV)," which incorporates a JAVA byte-code interpreter for executing control sequences exported by other HAVi devices on the 1394 network. The 1394 product will be available for evaluation and demonstrations in the fourth quarter with the production rollout targeted for the first quarter of 2001. The Philips Semiconductors 1394 HAVi solution starts at $125,000.

Innovative Semiconductors Goes to the Stars

The United States Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has selected Innovative Semiconductors' FlexFire Link and Digital PHY Layer cores for use in the NASA/JPL Advanced Deep Space Systems Technology program, known as X2000. JPL will use the cores to develop a chipset that will integrate computer, telecom, navigation, power management, and sensor technology to operate in the avionics and communications architecture of future spacecraft missions. The X2000 program seeks to make spacecraft electronics reusable across many different missions, while driving down the size, mass, power, and cost of spacecraft. To achieve this goal, the program leverages commercial technology such as the IEEE 1394 high-speed serial bus standard. The Mountain View, Calif.-based Innovative's cores are synthesizable register transfer level blocks that provide the Link and PHY Layer functions for the IEEE 1394 high-speed serial bus. The cores are based on Innovative's FlexFire architecture, which incorporates a set of parameterized building blocks that can be configured to support a wide range of applications. These blocks are delivered with an extensive test bench and a regression suite.

NEC Electronics Prototypes Widescreen LCD

NEC Electronics Inc., Santa Clara, Calif., has developed a prototype widescreen 20.1-inch (51cm) amorphous silicon thin-film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) module aimed at high-definition television and desktop publishing applications. With a 16:10 aspect ratio, the 51cm screen provides a 2.3-million pixel display at its maximum resolution of 1,280 x 1,240 pixels. With 8-bit RGB signal processing, the module supports 16.77 million colors. The prototype module uses a clear surface-finished front polarizer that enables image reproduction from VGA to wide UXGA resolution as well as high-definition television signals.

Imaging All the People

Linear and mixed signal IC maker Burr-Brown Corp. recently unveiled a single-chip, three-channel image signal processor designed for Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) or Contact Image Sensor (CIS) systems such as scanners and cameras. In image signal processing applications, the chip, dubbed VSP3100, serves as the analog front end, providing a direct interface between the CCD/CIS image sensor and the digital signal processor.