Audio Video News

Twenty bucks buys plenty of processing power these days. If you're a manufacturer shopping for a DVD chip, Cirrus Logic Corporation's Crystal Semiconductor has just what you're looking for. The San Mateo, CA-based company is now shipping its "98k"—an all-purpose, stand-alone DVD decoding device versatile enough to let designers write their own control code.

The brainchild of Luxsonar, a small design company in Fremont, CA, the 98k has been brought to market by Crystal because Luxsonar lacks the financial power to do so itself. The partnership is paying off for both companies, according to Crystal Consumer Audio Products Division vice president Terry Ritchie. The 98k is "an excellent audio/video system-on-a-chip," Ritchie said, but Luxsonar is "still a private company, and it doesn't have the capital or horsepower to take the product worldwide." Crystal's parent company, Cirrus Logic, does have the horsepower, and is making the 98k available to manufacturers worldwide at $20 per unit in quantities of 10,000.

Intended to compete with National Semiconductor Corp.'s Pantera chip, the 98k combines a 32-bit RISC processor, a video/graphics accelerator, an MPEG decoder and an NTSC/PAL encoder on a 208-pin quad flat package. Other features include a video input port for external video sources and a bus interface that can connect with hard drives—in particular, the IDE/Atapi. Inboard hard drives are becoming increasingly common with game consoles and set-top decoder boxes. Audio support includes MP3 decoding, Dolby Digital, and DTS output. The market for DVD-enabled products is exploding, and Crystal is going to cash in on the trend. "The biggest sphere for us is not DVD players but all these convergence products, like set-top boxes with DVD," Ritchie said.