Micronas sells 100 Million Multistandard Sound Processors (0019)

Freiburg, November 21, 2000 - Micronas announced that it has sold 100 million units of its Multistandard Sound Processors (MSP) chip family, making it the industry's most successful chip family in its class. Integrated in the MSP chips are demodulator and baseband functions for use in TV environments. This year alone, Micronas will sell some 35 Million MSP Chips to TV manufacturers worldwide.

The first chip of the MSP family was launched in 1989. While this chip was a pure TV audio demodulator - no baseband processing was included then -, the complexity of the chip family grew significantly over the years. The latest MSP 3452G is able to work with all TV audio systems worldwide. In addition to demodulation, the IC performs a broad range of baseband processing including Virtual Dolby and Dolby Pro Logic, allowing it to realize a complete Dolby Pro Logic solution on a single chip.

Micronas also offers a chipset for Dolby Digital (formerly known as AC3). This three-chip solution (the MSP 4450G, the co-processor DPL 4419G, and the Dolby Digital Decoder MAS 3528E) is ideally suited to build up a Dolby Digital system within a TV environment.

The basic idea of the MSP family was to develop ICs able to work with various TV standards. The MSP 2400 which went into volume production back in 1990, was compliant with all the different TV standards in Europe, making it a flexible and versatile chip that reduced customers' production and administration costs.

However, together with the MSP2400 two additional chips (AMU 2481 and ACP 2371) for performing the baseband processing were required.

Next, Micronas succeeded in integrating the demodulation and the entire baseband processing in one single chip. The MSP 3410B was the world's first single-chip TV decoder compliant with various TV standards to be introduced to the market. There are two on-chip microprocessor cores: One processor for processing NICAM, the second is optimized for digital signal processing of the baseband.

Then, Micronas developed a broad range of MSP chips, which goal was to provide solutions for the application-specific requirements of the customers. If a customer did not need to use a chip supporting all the different European TV standards, Micronas was able to ship a down-sized and more cost-effective solution. Now, users can also select between several baseband options. Since all the chips within the family feature identical pin out and identical software control, customers don't have to change their design if they change the MSP version or move from one generation to the following.

Furthermore, Micronas made the use of control software much easier. The MSP 3410D was programmable for the different TV standards with virtually no additional effort, only the code for the country the TV is supposed to be shipped to. All the rest of the programming is done automatically by the chip. No one has do bother with programming coefficients, frequencies or control protocols.

Micronas has expanded this strategy into higher-level functions such as automatic standard detection or automatic audio mode recognition. The latest members of the family, the MSP 34xyG and MSP 44xyG differ in sample rate (32 kHz and 48 kHz, respectively). They are in volume production now and available with a number of different options such as compatibility to TV
standards worldwide, compatibility to TV standards of special world regions or countries, different levels of baseband processing, Virtual Dolby and Dolby Pro Logic. All these different versions are software- and hardware compatible.