Silicon Vision driving video standard

Electronic News, June 10, 1996 by Andrew MacLellan

Fremont, Calif.--Silicon Vision is leveraging its digital camera technology expertise to push a new digital camera driver interface standard for the PC together with joint development and foundry partner GEC Plessey Semiconductors (GPS).

The iVision standard, which is anchored by the new Silicon Vision/GPS VP7600 iCam host chip, is said to enable manipulation of functions at the camera head, giving software applications developers the ability to control frame rates, resolution, picture size and color depth in software directly from the PC. According to Silicon Vision, the standard's rules-based toolset, which enables software camera control driven at the application code level, also allows for the addition of new features such as auto set-up buttons and variable resolution modes.

Silicon Vision strategic marketing manager Michael Miller said as many as 40 semiconductor vendors, VGA card providers and systems OEMs have signed or are near to signing on to the iVision technology standard.

While the iCam host chip will work with any digital camera, provided a dedicated connector is installed, Mr. Miller said the IC is optimized when coupled with Silicon Vision's iVision camera which it is also promoting under the new interface standard.

The VP7600 chip is available now in sample quantities for $16. Another version, the VP7610, will integrate the system's external video line buffers and is expected for introduction in July.

Steve Brightfield, worldwide marketing manager for GPS' Media Business unit, said the company began working with Silicon Vision nine months ago in the hopes of standardizing the video compression and videoconferencing interface between digital cameras and the PC. GPS expects to manufacture 250,000 iCam chips this year, has licensed the technology and will include the iCam IC in its ASIC library.

"We have productized the iCam chip and came about this because of our dissatisfaction with the analog camera's performance and its ability to meet the H.261 compression standard," Mr. Brightfield said. "And as we look forward to the H.263 POTS (plain old telephone system) algorithm, it becomes even more critical."

By eliminating the need for temporal filtering and frame averaging, the iCam chip is said to vary the frame rates and exposure times of video compression and videoconferencing applications for better performance and color contrast in low light conditions under MPEG-2 and International Telecommunications Union standards.

Mr. Brightfield said the iCam host chips will first appear in video frame buffer add-in and VGA daughter cards, using the same scaling functions as cards already in production by S3, Oak Technology, Cirrus Logic and others.