NEC Electronics Introduces Single-Chip DVD Recorder Codec IC Family for Low-end Market

Compared to the µPD61181, the new four-product family:

- Reduces pin count by approximately 35 percent (from 449 pins to 292 pins), reducing bill-of-materials
- Un-bundles the IEEE1394 A/V link controller and offering it as an optional element, eliminating unnecessary costs for applications that do not require it
- Shifts certain video display functions from hardware to software, reducing chip size and costs
- Allows pin multiplexing between the general purpose I/O port, ATA interface and IEEE interface, offering greater flexibility
- Offers a significant decrease in sample pricing, from US$100, to US$55
The combination of the above features decreases costs and offers greater flexibility to system developers, facilitating the development of low-end DVD recorder applications.

In addition to supporting MPEG1 and MPEG2, the µPD61177/8 also support playback of DivX® Video, a type of MPEG4 compression format, with the addition of DivX decoding functions to the video decoder. All four products incorporate two MIPS32® 4KETM CPU cores, which offer superior performance with low power consumption, helping the four products to decrease power consumption by approximately 50 percent from 3.0w to 1.5w. Other product features include doubled sampling rate of the video DAC (from 54MHz to 108MHz for a 10-bit sample size), as well as dual stream processors.

The product family will be on display at CEATEC Japan, starting October 5, 2004 at Makuhari Messe. Please refer to the attachment for product details.