Finally, the Dawn of TriMedia? Philips has goals for processor

Electronic News, Oct 18, 1999 by Peter Brown

Sunnyvale, Calif.--The time for Philips Semiconductors' TriMedia chip may be at hand. The company is setting the stage to have the processor become its bread and butter for the coming years as emerging consumer electronics applications begin to debut with the chip inside.

The TriMedia is a media processor based on a very long instruction word (VLIW) architecture and targeted at being the "brains" to consumer, communications and computer applications that feature audio, video, graphics and communications datastreams.

The idea of a media processor sounds great. However, the track record of previous chips has been less than stellar. Not only have they failed to get off the ground and into applications, some companies even failed to introduce their products. This has led to a basic feeling of unrest when anyone mentions media processors being the driving engine in the market.

However, Philips, since the third quarter of 1997, has been the exception. With the TriMedia, the company has been able to garner some consumer and communications sockets and has basically taken over the videoconferencing space with its chip. But it was a slow start and only now is the market starting to see the VLIW architectures - and, to Philips, more importantly, the TriMedia - take off.

"There was a lot of confusion last year about what a media processor would do and if the VLIW architecture would be right for the applications we were targeting," said Cees Hartring, vice president and general manager of the TriMedia group at Philips. "We see now that VLIW is the right architecture as we see companies like Intel, Fujitsu, Equator, all working with the technology, as well as numerous others."

Because of this and dual-processor approaches with RISC and digital signal processor (DSP) chips, a large number of applications that have media processor functionality will be on the market in the coming years if not already today, said Hartring.

This may change the impression of media processors as only being duds in the marketplace. Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts, a market research firm in Tempe, Ariz., said that media processors are built for non-PC areas, mostly for consumer products. This is where Chromatic Research and others have failed with media processors and Philips has managed to survive with its chip.

However, this means that these are areas where the volumes are not yet up to the level of PCs but could be, given time. Strauss said that this year there would be approximately 800,000 media processors sold. That number will jump to 1.7 million units by next year, 3.3 million by 2001 and 6 million by 2002.

How many of these are TriMedia chips? That is unknown because Philips does not break out that information on its products. The company did ship its 100,000th unit last year since it started shipping in volume with the TriMedia, said David Barringer, director of marketing for the TriMedia at Philips.

Strauss added that Philips has had some successful sockets including one of the only non-PC videoconferencing systems developed by Polycom.

Videoconferencing is one of three areas that Philips is looking at the TriMedia to be integrated into. Beyond Polycom, the company says it has signed up numerous other video conferencing systems; however, can not reveal those companies' names.

One of the other areas is in the PC space where the TriMedia has been integrated into PC add-in cards for graphics from Matrox Graphics, AliChrome and others.

The final segment is where Strauss believes Philips will make its biggest penetration--the consumer electronics market. The company is working with various set-top box manufactures as well as traditional television manufacturers for high-definition and digital television. Samsung is one of these companies along with the Philips Electronics parent. Here again, Philips said it has signed up numerous other companies but has yet to reveal these companies in public.