Micronas Designs Industry’s Smallest, Fully Integrated Audio Video Decoder for Digital Media Devices (0711)
Superior audio and video quality chips built from flagship IP products
Santa Clara, CA – August 7, 2007 – Micronas (Zurich, Switzerland, SWX Swiss Exchange: MASN), a leading supplier of innovative, application-specific IC system solutions for consumer electronics, today announced the availability of an advanced and fully integrated audio/video front-end decoder (AVF 49x0B) well suited for consumer devices such as Personal Video Recorders (PVRs), DVD recorders, set-top boxes, PC-TV applications and video projectors.
The AVF 49x0B analog video and audio decoder provides an extensive set of features and functional integration at very low power consumption. The AVF 49x0B supports worldwide analog broadcast TV video decoding and analog video input sources, including composite video, S-Video, component video, and SCART RGB. The video data path features superior quality with its 10-bit front-to-back video processing capability and up to 8 video inputs that can be flexibly assigned to the composite and component video processing paths.
The AVF 49x0B masters all worldwide audio broadcast TV standards with its stereo audio decoder for BTSC/SAP, A2, NICAM, AM, and FM by interfacing directly with a wide range of tuners via standard sound-IF input. An integrated high quality stereo audio ADC provides a set of baseband audio inputs to complete the typical application input requirements. The integrated universal VBI data slicer supports data formats such as Teletext, closed captioning, CGMS, XDS and many more formats. Combined with the choice of providing the VBI data either by merging it into the ITU-656 video output stream or via the I²C serial command interface makes the chip easy to integrate into virtually all platforms. The significant benefits of this offering include a tiny 9x9 mm² 64 pin QFN package; the very small footprint ideally designed for mobile designs, plus low power consumption (below 300mW) with power management support. The AVF 49x0B also delivers exceptional audio quality and supports enhanced high definition (HD) digital video formats of up to 1080i resolution through its analog component video inputs. Applications like USB TV designs can now offer full-featured audio and video decoding in popular small stick sizes.
The audio-video decoder supports NTSC, PAL and SECAM standards, and at the same time, through its 3-D comb filter option, enables very high quality Y/C separation for composite video sources from either TV tuners or legacy consumer devices.
“The growing PVR market shifts from analog to hybrid, paying tribute to the emerging digital TV standards. Analog cable TV broadcast remains to be widely deployed. Therefore analog audio and video decoding remains a standard feature and continues to be in strong demand,” said Kai Scheffer, Director Marketing PC at Micronas. “With quality at the forefront of every design movement at Micronas, the AVF 49x0B addresses the market requirements for performance, size, quality, integration, and system cost.”
With all the new digital products entering the market today, customers are requiring quick and easy setup and operation. Developers are responding with solid performance and speedy development cycles, and AVF 49x0B fits this requirement with its easy to integrate control interface.
The new AVF 49x0B chips, in either the PQFN64 pin or MQFP128 pin package, provide leading-edge functionality and performance and are ready for production now.