Micronas and Cabot Communications Break New Ground for Digital TV Market in UK (0322)

First MHEG-5 pre-integration with hybrid video decoder speeds up IDTV design

Freiburg (Germany)/Bristol (UK), September 10, 2003 - Micronas and Cabot Communications today announced the first hybrid analog-digital video decoder platform to be pre-integrated with an MHEG-5 (Multimedia and Hypermedia information coding Expert Group) engine paving the way for digital terrestrial TVs in the UK and enabling interactive television. The MDE 9500 single-CPU video decoder allows CE manufacturers to design cost effective IDTVs (integrated analog/digital TVs) with only one CPU and STBs and conforms to imminent FreeView minimum receiver specifications that are set to include the MHEG-5 interactive standard. Integrated with Cabot's Mercator MHEG-5 development kit and incorporating Cabot's Callisto over-air download module, the MDE 9500 provides manufacturers with a secure and robust field upgrade technology that conforms to the existing UK standard.

The industry's first MHEG-5 pre-integration with the MDE 9500 hybrid video decoder is also set to rapidly speed up IDTV design by offering the first completely integrated software package to unify all user interaction for both analog and digital video broadcast services.

"The Micronas solution will undoubtedly speed up delivery of the next generation of IDTVs," stated Keith Potter, managing director of Cabot, whose Mercator MHEG-5 decoder is already deployed on 500,000 digital receivers. "The pre-integration of an MHEG-5 engine represents a significant and necessary step forward for the industry. Consumer electronics manufacturers can now ensure the next generation of IDTVs are backward-compatible to the existing analog TV infrastructure, while offering all the benefits of digital interactive TV."

The Freeview digital terrestrial platform is based on the MHEG-5 standard for interactive services and digital teletext. Cabot Communications' Mercator MHEG-5 development kit offers standardised interfaces and components allowing easy integration to significantly reduce engineering time and effort. Mercator will enable set-top box and integrated digital TV manufacturers to keep pace with the fast-evolving UK MHEG-5 standard and to bring products to the market more quickly and with a greater range of interactive applications. This allows system manufacturers to capitalise on the fast growing demand for the Freeview digital terrestrial platform, a market in which 1.5 million units had already been sold by June this year. Cabot expects this figure to reach 3 million units in sales by the end of 2003.

"Micronas continues to break new ground for digital terrestrial TV," said Peter Rost, Director Marketing Digital TV at Micronas. "With the addition of Cabot's market-leading MHEG-5 engine we are giving our customers a significant advantage by offering a completely integrated software package, with minimum customisation requirements. This helps manufacturers to bring IDTVs to market quickly, while lowering production costs. We selected Cabot's MHEG-5 engine because it offers very fast interaction speeds with surprisingly low screen update times. Our MDE 9500 single-chip solution also ensures higher quality graphics and an improved viewing experience for consumers."

About Mercator

Mercator is a complete, packaged development kit including object libraries and full documentation, allowing set-top box and IDTV manufacturers to quickly add MHEG-5 support for the burgeoning UK market. Mercator is available for most CPU architectures and includes the CHIL (Cabot High Level Interface) API for platform independence. Unlike alternative MHEG-5 engines, Mercator was developed as an embedded implementation and therefore has low memory requirements and high performance. In addition, Mercator makes upgrades of the evolving MHEG-5 standard a straightforward process, significantly reducing the cost of maintaining product lines for manufacturers.

About the MDE 9500 family

The Micronas MDE 9500 mixed-signal decoder family combines all of the network-independent digital signal process tasks of digital receivers while also supporting analog video processing. The high-performance graphic system supports DVB recommendations, embedded TV applications and upcoming services like interactive TV. Furthermore, the chip features interfaces to address devices such as ATA/IDE hard-disk drives. The interfaces and the system partitioning enable manufacturers to build up complete IDTV and STB system solutions.

In combination with the COFDM-Demodulator DRX 8872C and its DAC 3350A 48kHz audio D/A-converter, Micronas now offers complete hard- and software solutions for the booming UK digital terrestrial receiver market. This includes turn-key reference designs for both a zapping STB and a Common Interface based hybrid IDTV.

About Cabot
Cabot Communications is a leading independent European supplier of Digital TV software technologies for set-top boxes and integrated digital TVs. Cabot's solution enables manufacturers to build and support cost-effective and differentiated receivers for pan-European coverage of Digital TV and interactive broadcasts. Cabot delivers a complete modular Digital TV software solution for a wide range of CPU architectures. Combined with Cabot's specialised Digital TV services including integration, design consultancy and field support, Cabot enables OEMs to get compelling products to market quickly. Cabot's technology is robust and deployed with over 11 major manufacturers. For more information: www.cabot.co.uk