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Multimedia PC
INTRODUCTION
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The Multimedia PC is finally earning its name. First a business
and professional tool driven by such things as video editing,
video conferencing and office-based applications, the MPC is
now invading the home, with new functions such as TV, radio,
VCR, phone, newspaper, games, books, picture album and
more.
Philips Semiconductors is in a uniquely strong position both to
satisfy customer needs in this rapidly growing market and
provide technology leadership. One of the world’s largest semi-
conductor manufacturers, Philips Semiconductors has in house a
vast strength in depth of applied multimedia technology exper-
tise and can draw on the product and market knowledge of a sis-
ter consumer electronics division, to offer complete solutions for
the MPC.
A leader in digital video processing
Philips offers a very large range of solutions in digital video. Our
families of highly integrated multistandard decoders and
encoders offer very high quality performance, for such PC-based
applications as video editing and video conferencing. Other ICs
offer high performance scaling and many devices in the chipset
have on-board colour processing, conversion and filtering func-
tions. And for a truly complete video offering, Philips has video
A/D and D/A converters, camera DSPs, single-chip monitor ICs
and so on.
Exploiting the latest bus technologies
Philips is applying their PCI bus expertise in their latest desktop
video processing and graphics ICs, to deliver real-time process-
ing and capture of video and graphics in the PC. Outside the
PC, Philips is first to the market with a USB transceiver and
stand-alone HUB and has USB audio DACs and monitor
microcontrollers in development, ideal for low data rate “plug
‘n’ play” multimedia PC devices. And Philips also has ICs for an
enhanced version of the IEEE P1394 worldwide multimedia
connection standard, allowing it to carry MPEG-2 streams.
MPEG decoding
As one of the members of MPEG, Philips is playing an active
role in developing and refining MPEG compression standards.
The depth of Philips expertise is reflected in the quality of its
MPEG ICs, which implement the standards in full, delivering
excellent decompression quality for both audio and video.
Philips has a family of dedicated audio MPEG-1 and MPEG-2
decoders including versions with enhanced error correction for
digital radio; and a highly integrated audio/video/graphics
MPEG-2 decoder for digital TV applications.
TV and radio, digital and analog
Analog TV solutions for the PC cover all worldwide standards
and, by drawing on their extensive RF expertise and shielding
know-how, Philips is the first semiconductor manufacturer to
offer a high quality radio for the PC, including R(B)DS func-
tionality. Recent digital TV and digital radio solutions for the
PC draw on technologies and ICs developed for broadcast appli-
cations.
Solutions for all CD systems
As one of the pioneers of CD, Philips today can offer complete
system solutions for all the various CD technologies. We have
high-speed CD-ROM decoders and a range of highly integrated
datapath ICs offering speeds up to 12×for IDE and SCSI appli-
cations. Our extensive offer also includes the world's first single-
chip CD-Recordable/Erasable interface IC covering both IDE
and SCSI systems, offering 8×speed read and 4×speed write.
Digital audio for all multimedia needs
A world leader in digital audio, Philips' Bitstream technique
delivers the highest conversion performance available today,
with Continuous Calibration delivering low power, economy
solutions. Our range of ADCs/DACs is second to none; we have
single-chip sound-channel processing ICs for a number of PC
applications; and the first of a leading-edge audio CODEC fam-
ily offers six-channel digital mixing, on-board audio synthesis
and a host of other sound processing functions, making it effec-
tively a single-chip sound card.
Next generation programmable multimedia
By combining cost-effective advanced microprocessor technolo-
gy, easy programmability and comprehensive software tools,
Philips TriMedia family provides a complete, high performance
programmable multimedia solution. At the core is a next-genera-
tion DSP/CPU which integrates the power of a DSP with a
robust, CPU style software environment, to offer true multi-
media processing – the concurrent processing of audio, video,
graphics and communications. By combining the power of DSP
technology with a breakthrough software architecture which
allows programming in familiar high level language, together
with an instruction set optimized for multimedia, TriMedia is
more than powerful enough to drive the next generation of mul-
timedia products. It is fully supported with extensive software
development tools. For more information on TriMedia, see
Section 13.
Systems and application support – worldwide
Philips provides not only a large number of individual ICs, but
also many complete chipset and system solutions for a number
of MPC applications, all backed by reference designs,
demoboards and software. Customer support is available world-
wide and there are dedicated MPC groups in the USA
(Sunnyvale) and Europe (Hamburg, Germany), each with their
own development groups. Extensive applications and design-in
support is provided through five Systems Laboratories in
Sunnyvale (USA), Eindhoven (the Netherlands), Hamburg
(Germany), Southampton (UK) and Taipei (Taiwan).
UNIQUELY QUALIFIED IN PC-BASED MULTIMEDIA SOLUTIONS