Harris unveils first multimedia market entry

Electronic News, March 3, 1997 by Sarah Cohen

Melbourne, Fla.--Harris Semiconductor's NTSC/PAL video encoder-decoder chipset, its first announced entry into the multimedia market, is the first in a planned series. Harris said it will introduce a line of chips that will be part of an ISDN based, H.320 compliant reference design, as well as the basis of a similar reference design for a wireless video conferencing system.

Chris Henningsen, director of marketing for Harris' wireless and multimedia division, said Harris has gathered engineers from three of the company's four divisions--semiconductors, communications systems and electronic systems--in order to develop a five-chip reference design.

In the meantime, the company will individually roll out the chips within the next few months targeting high volume applications unrelated to the reference design. The next chips to make their debut will be an audio codec, a decompressor and compressor.

Mr. Henningsen stated: "Multimedia is a huge market that's growing rapidly. And we had expertise in all the components of the reference design. For instance, every decoder has an A/D converter, which we develop; every encoder has an D/A converter, which we develop; every audio codec has sigma delta capabilities, in which we've had a number of years experience; and every audio codec has a DSP. We have a DSP group. Our DSPs our different from TI's or Analog Devices' in that theirs are software programmable and ours are hard wired."

Mr. Henningsen went on to say that most of Harris' research and development expenditures go toward multimedia, and the anticipated convergence between the wireless local area network (LAN) and video conferencing. Mr. Henningsen estimates that Harris has spent $10 million over the past year on multimedia R&D.

The NTSC/PAL video chipset consists of the HMP8112 decoder, priced at $15.35 in quantities of 1,000; and HMP8156 encoder, priced at $9.98 in same quantities. The decoder contains a patented comb filter implementation for NTSC luminance color (Y/C) separation without loss of vertical detail, said Harris; a patented sample rate converter that lets the decoder use any available clock instead of a specific clock frequency; and digital phase-locked loops for steadier images in PC-based home video editing.

Applications include home video cassette recorder (VCR)-to personal computer (PC) editing systems, PC video capture (TV tuners, frame grabbers), teleconferencing systems, digital video disk players and digital VCRs.

The HMP8112 competes with decoders offered by Philips, Brooktree, TRW/Raytheon and Samsung. The HMP8156 encoder competes with devices from Philips, Brooktree, Analog Devices and Sony.