Micronas and Tara Systems Enable Shorter Time-to-Market for Multimedia Products (0223)

Freiburg and Munich, Germany -November 05, 2002- Micronas, a leading supplier of IC solutions for multimedia, consumer and automotive electronics, and Tara Systems announced an agreement to extend their existing partnership in order to shorten development cycle times for multimedia products. Micronas provides multimedia application designs to enable customers to develop their own customized products either in-house or, from now on, in direct cooperation with Tara Systems.

"By providing our customers with direct access to a third-party supplier, we enable them to develop their own customized products in a very short period of time and to differentiate themselves from their competition," said Peter Weigand, head of multimedia at Micronas. "Short time-to-market is a key success factor in the rapidly changing world of multimedia with its extremely short product life cycles."

"With its PUC controller family and MASF audio codec family, Micronas offers a cost effective, high performance platform solution for multimedia products," commented Alexander Wass, managing director at Tara Systems. "Together with Tara's system and software expertise, we enable designers to develop custom-specific applications in much shorter periods of time."

As part of the agreement, Micronas will recommend Tara as a partner for the development of specific reference designs. In addition, Micronas and Tara engineers will jointly define the application design platform provided for customization and carry out feasibility studies.

In the past, Tara has successfully developed hardware and software based on Micronas' ColumbusDRIVE application board, first introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January 2002. Based on the Micronas PUC controller and MASF audio codec platform, the ColumbusDRIVE application board is optimized for the development of audio players (MP3, WMA and AAC).

With its PUC family of universal processors based on the ARM7TDMI core and the audio DSPs and codecs of the MAS and DAC families, Micronas offers a design platform which enables system manufacturers to develop a variety of products based on just a few, compatible ICs. Possible end products range from low-cost audio players with mere playback functionality to high-end solutions, for example for cell phones, which also permit the recording of music.
 

About Tara Systems

Tara Systems is providing services in embedded system development. The Munich based company which was founded in 1990 focuses on the acquisition and decoding of data streams hidden in TV transmissions, and their visualisation on analog and digital TV sets, Set Top Boxes or PC-based simulations.

Further information is available at www.tara-systems.de.