Micronas Presents New Video Processor for Flat-Panel Display TV Sets (0205)

The highly integrated chip greatly reduces R&D efforts and costs for new TV sets

Freiburg, Germany - January 8, 2002 - Micronas announced the launch of a video processor specifically designed for use in television sets with flat-panel displays (liquid crystal displays and plasma displays). The DPS 9450 supports display resolutions from VGA (640 x 480 pixel) to WXGA (1365 x 768 pixel). By offering display processors for both cathode ray tube displays (CRT) and flat-panel displays, Micronas completes the company's platform concept for TV applications.

Together with the MSP family of audio controllers and the digital broadcast decoder chip MDE 9500, Micronas can now provide system manufacturers with a one-stop shopping opportunity for all video and audio applications. Micronas' complete technical solution allows system manufacturers to greatly reduce development efforts and costs, by enabling the re-use of CRT software in a new system with a flat-panel display.

During the next few years, the mass market will still be dominated by the classic tube-TV set. At the same time, a segmentat ion into new display technologies like liquid crystal display (LCD), plasma display and projectors will take place. Particularly for these new display technologies growth rates above the average are expected.

"Micronas is now offering various feature options for complete front-end functionality and display control," explained Johann Weierer, Micronas' marketing manager video & graphic. "Our scalable platform provides TV manufacturers with the highest flexibility for integrating chips into target applications at low cost, with reduced R&D effort and bringing the product to market within the shortest possible time."

With the unique combination of scaler and image quality improvement functions on one single chip, the DPS 9450 realizes video on flat-panel displays with unequalled image quality. Current scaler chips are designed for use in PCs and are consequently not 100 percent suitable for use in TV sets with flat-panel displays.

The image quality improvement processes of the DPS 9450 comprise traditional algorithms known from television engineering and dedicated algorithms newly developed for LCDs and plasma displays. The processes include digital color transition improvement, luminance transition improvement, dynamic contrast improvement, adaptive peaking, black level expander, brightness contrast saturation control and chrominance saturation and TINT control.

"In the past, Micronas offered the DDP 3310B and DDP 3315C focused on applications in CRT TVs. With the DPS 9450, Micronas is now opening up the rapidly growing market for flat-panel display TV sets", said Weierer. "Based on our product family concept, we can provide tailor-made solutions for all audio/video front-end system applications in a TV set, together with an extensive portfolio of sca lable building blocks. Integrating more and more functions on one chip, Micronas offers system manufacturers a safe way into the future."

According to Micronas, the market for flat-panel TV sets will reach 1.8 million units this year and nearly double to 3.5 million units next year. In 2005, the company expects to see 7.8 million TV sets equipped with flat-panel displays.

The new video processors operate with a power supply of 1.8 and 3.3 V and comes in P-MQFP144 packages. Samples of the DPS 9450 will be available in the first quarter of 2002 and full production will start in Q3 2002. Unit price is approximately $10 for high volumes.

About DPS 9450
The DPS 9450 consists of three main functional units. The first unit comprises the video interfaces for the incoming analog and/or digital signals. In the second unit, scaling to flat-panel display format takes place and in the third unit, functional blocks of the video signal improvement are integrated. The output interface to the flat-panel display supports single and dual-pixel mode.

The following inputs are available in the first functional block: ITU-601/656, YUV/RGB (3 x 8 Bit) and analogue YUV/RGB plus fast blank (FBL) as well as RGB digital 4:4:4 plus FBL for on screen display. The ITU-601/656 interface supports for example Micronas' color decoder chips. The digital YUV/RGB interface supports external DVI components.

For the analogue YUV/RGB plus FBL interface, Micronas integrated a Quadruple ADC with a sample rate of 40,5 MSamples on a chip while system manufacturers today are often forced to use external ADCs to realize such functions. Employing the DPS 9450 saves system-manufacturing costs of $2 to $3.

Also integrated are the scaler memory, de-interlacer and various image quality improvement functions, and additional integration of the oscillator reduces the number of external components further.