Micronas/WISchip and Digital 5 Partner on Digital Media Server (0602)
To Offer a Micronas/WISchip 7108-based Digital Media Server Reference Design
CES 2006, LAS VEGAS, NV, January 5, 2006 - WISchip International Ltd., a Micronas group company and global provider of digital video and audio semiconductor solutions, today announced a partnership with Digital 5, a leading provider of software for streaming of multimedia content, to develop and co-market a digital media server (DMS) reference design. The joint collaboration will enable consumer electronics original design manufacturers (ODMs) and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to rapidly develop digital media server products for the new age of the digital home, reducing their costs and significantly speeding their time to market.
Micronas/WISchip and Digital 5 will be available for private demonstrations and briefings at the 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show to be held in Las Vegas Jan. 5-8, 2006.
The partnership combines the highly integrated, Micronas/WISchip Cypher 7108-based Network PVR reference design hardware platform with Digital 5 network attached storage (NAS) media server middleware, a complete NAS media server software solution. Together, they will offer OEMs and ODMs a complete multi-format digital media server core providing media acquisition, recording, storage and distribution capabilities. Digital 5 Media Server is based on the DLNA Interoperability Model. Manufacturers can build upon this core to create highly differentiable consumer electronics DMS devices more quickly and at significantly lower cost.
The DLNA describes a digital media server as a broad category of consumer electronics product capable of acquiring, recording, storing and distributing digital media – audio, video and images, etc. – over a home network to a variety of digital media players. Examples of digital media servers include advanced set-top boxes, personal video recorders, personal computers, music servers, broadcast tuners, digital cameras and camcorders and multimedia mobile phones. A digital media server could simultaneously deliver cable TV to the bedroom and send audio to the stereo system in the living room, while sending photos to a PC in the den and recording a different TV program from a satellite server for later viewing.
“Micronas/WISchip’s expertise in developing powerful, highly integrated digital media processors and reference platforms combined with Digital 5’s proven software will enable us to provide OEMs and ODMs with a compact, fanless, ‘digital media filling station’ reference design,” said Jim Nguyen, director of marketing with Micronas/WISchip. “As the most versatile MPEG encoding SoC solution on the market, the Cypher 7108 delivers the highest audio/video quality available today.”
The Micronas/WISchip Cypher 7108’s advanced hardware compression technology supports a broad range of audio and video encoding formats, including MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile (without GMC), MPEG-2/1, Motion JPEG and H.263. The Cypher 7108 can perform video encoding at full D1 (720x480) resolution, and audio encoding formats include two-channel Dolby Digital (AC-3) at up to 448 Kbps, as well as MPEG-1/2 layers I & II.
The reference design features an integrated 166-Mhz MIPS CPU, and provides an ATAPI hard disk connector, as well as USB 2.0 OTG and mini-PCI connector system interfaces within a 3½-inch hard disk form factor. One 10/100 Base-T Ethernet connector and wireless 802.11 b/g via a mini-PCI card network are also provided. The Cypher 7108 also offers a 32-bit DDR SDRAM memory interface as well as direct connections for ATAPI, Ethernet MAC, PCI 2.2, Host Parallel Interface (HPI), USB 2.0 (OTG), I2C and I2S. It also supports advanced scene change detection and features de-noise filters, a video preview engine, seamless A/V synchronization and video source error-handling capabilities.
“We are excited by the opportunity to join with Micronas/WISchip in creating this advanced DMS-enabling technology for this emerging market,” said Gary Hughes, chairman and CEO of Digital 5. “Our combined solution will enable OEMs and ODMs to leverage a complete reference platform and accelerate their time-to-market for the next generation of exciting new devices designed to manage the explosion of digital media content in the connected digital home.”
In addition to DLNA 1.0 compliance, the Digital 5 technology supports industry standards such as UPnP, HTTP, RTP, NMPR and 802.11g. Digital 5 provides an application customization layer creating the ability to easily add additional application functionality and utilize the customizable user interface to expose more features, enhance the device capabilities and enrich the user experience. The Digital 5 software offers leading quality of service (QoS) streaming technology and supports the ability to remotely auto upgrade the device firmware functionality and software synchronization, enabling device manufactures to incrementally update product capabilities and bring new premium services directly to the device in the field.
The Digital Living Network Alliance created an open, standards-based interoperability framework comprising interoperable building blocks for devices and a software infrastructure, and provides guidelines so that products from different vendors support a common baseline.
Availability and Pricing
The combined Micronas/WISchip-Digital 5 digital media server solution will be available in the first quarter of 2006. For Micronas/WISchip Network PVR Reference Design pricing information, please contact Micronas/WISchip at (408) 625-1200. For information on licensing the Digital 5 NAS Media Server software for the Micronas/WISchip platform, contact Digital 5 at sales@digital5.com .