Oak builds CE business target-1/3 revenues from consumer electronics

Electronic News, Nov 2, 1998 by Peter Brown

The DVD technology is for Oak's DVD reference designs. With the MicroSparc license, Oak is gearing all of its future CE development toward the MicroSparc processor architecture because the company believes this processor enables a high performance while keeping things cost competitive.

"With having a common architecture across multiple set-top boxes all we need to do is change the interface between delivery systems," said Mr. Vroomen. "So if a customer needs a terrestrial box we can give that to them, or if they need satellite or cable set-top we can do that as well. That is the position we have geared our business toward." Having a common platform to write the software for these set-tops makes life easier for the company as well, he noted.

Atlanta And Access

The Atlanta and Access reference design boards that the company will introduce today are designed with the CE business unit strategy in mind. The Atlanta board is a ready-for-production DVD player reference design based on the company's OTI-226 DVD system chip.

The design supports the DVD 1.0, Super Video CD, VCD, and CD-DA specifications and includes navigation and control software. The Access reference design is targeted at OEMs developing DTV satellite set-top boxes.

Access is based on the Oak OTI-8211 MPEG-2 A/V decoder and the OTI-8511 QPSK demodulator. Oak claims the reference design reduces the time it takes for an OEM to move from design to full production regardless of whether the OEM is developing free-to-air satellite or conditional access cable or satellite DTV STBs.

In addition, Oak has garnered a design win for its interactive digital set-top box from Celerity Systems, a maker of digital video servers and set-top boxes for the interactive video services market. Celerity will be using the Oak OTI- 8211 MPEG-2 decoder for its T 6000 digital set-top box that is designed with a fast processor, multiple interfaces and graphics for the interactive video market.