Toshiba partners with Zoran & Crystal

Electronic News, Oct 14, 1996

Mountain View, Calif.--Toshiba America last week separately signed agreements with Zoran Corp. and Crystal Semiconductor under which they will supply Toshiba with audio processors for multimedia and portable PCs, as well as digital versatile disc (DVD) systems.

Toshiba will use Zoran's Dolby Digital AC-3/MPEG audio processor for the audio capabilities in a DVD chipset. The Zoran ZR38521 is a two-channel AC-3/MPEG decoder for DVD applications. The Toshiba DVD chipset will be included in DVD players that Toshiba plans to manufacture and ship later this year.

"Zoran decoders will be included in the majority of the new DVD products," said Levy Gerzberg, president and CEO of Zoran. "We are fully committed to meeting the needs of the next wave of consumer multimedia products, and plan to leverage this DVD experience and system know-how in future products that will incorporate advanced algorithms and special audio sound effects."

Quoting numbers from market research house Dataquest, Toshiba said the DVD player market is in the initial stages of growth and is expected to reach 10.3 million units by the year 2000. The number of PCs that will have a DVD drive is expected to reach 24.9 million units by the year 2000.

Meanwhile, Toshiba also signed an agreement to incorporate Crystal Semiconductor's CS4232 audio subsystem IC for the multimedia portable PC market.

Crystal Semiconductor said the CS4232 is a single-chip plug-and-play device that offers full duplex operation and 16-bit CD-quality sound as well as Creative Labs SoundBlaster Pro compatibility, external digital volume control and advanced power management (APM).

"Consumers now expect desktop functionality from their portable machines," said Brad Fluke, director of marketing at Crystal Semiconductor. "As demonstrated by Toshiba's new designs, the high performance and minimal space requirements of Crystal's family of audio ICs allow portable PC manufacturers to integrate desktop-equivalent audio into their portable designs."

In a related development, Toshiba also introduced a zoomed video (ZV)/MPEG-1 playback card for portable computers that run applications such as business presentations, educational programs and PC games. The ZV port/MPEG-1 PC cards are priced at $229 each in single-unit quantities.

The cards provide full motion MPEG-1 video without using the CPU or system bus and are compatible with Toshiba's Satellite Pro, Tecra and Portege families as well as the MPC3 standards for multimedia systems.

Toshiba claims that by using the ZV port and MPEG-1 the device is able to deliver full-motion video at 640 by 480 resolution while running at 30 frames per second (FPS). The device achieves this by connecting a dedicated bus directly to the audio and video controllers.