Oak Extends CD Know-How To DVD

Dual-IC Solution To Compete With Panasonic, Sony Chips

4-Apr-00

In the consumer-electronics market, the road to a low-cost DVD-Video player ends with a single chip. Oak Technology Inc.'s two-chip DVD controller is but a step away. Oak, based in Sunnyvale, California, has entered the market for DVD-Video players with its two-chip OTI-9820 and OTI-2650 chipset, and will face immediate competition from the two leading consumer DVD-Video player OEMs, Panasonic and Sony, whose internal chip houses produce about half the chips in the market, according to In-Stat Inc., in Phoenix, Arizona. What Oak is banking on, however, is a transition from full-featured, leading-edge DVD drives to lower-cost versions targeted at emerging geographic regions. To date, Oak has honed its craft in rewriteable CDs, a market that will replace the CD-ROM drive and sell 28.6 million units this year, according to Adams, Harkness & Hill Inc., in Boston, Massachusetts. Oak's chief executive, Young Sohn, was brought in from Quantum Corp. to oversee the company's exit from the PC-graphics and audio arena, but DVD-Video players are a product in which a number of technologies converge. ""Not many people were interested in CD-recording technology,"" Sohn said. ""But the first-generation products will be the so-called 'combi drives' [combining DVD-ROM, CD-ROM, and CD-RW capabilities], and the next generation will be the DVD player,"" he said. The term ""DVD player"" is a bit of a misnomer, said Alain Bismuth, Oak's Vice President of DVD Products. ""Customers used to refer to this as a 'universal player,'"" he said. Today, the DVD player has to support MPEG-2 audio and video, PCM audio, and DolbyÆ Digital, or AC-3Æ, audio in addition to the CD-R, CD-RW, and recordable DVD formats. Tomorrow's players will probably support next-generation audio CD standards, MP3 audio, and DVD-Audio, Bismuth said. ""A customer doesn't want to have to redesign the platform when a new standard emerges,"" he added. Consumer DVD-Video players also began in the fourth quarter of last year to shift the silicon outside the DVD drive mechanism, according to Bismuth. Now, the ""DVD loader"" contains only the mechanism for spinning the disk and the optical servo and read head necessary to read data off the disk. The OTI-9820 single-chip servo controller takes this data and feeds it to the OTI2650 DVD back end, which handles the bulk of the processing. The OTI2650 contains an integrated 32-bit microSparc CPU, paired with a 24-bit audio DSP responsible for adding the 3D sound and karaoke algorithms Oak developed as a PC audio supplier. Dolby Digital, MPEG-2, MP3, and HDCD decoding are also applied if necessary. An on-chip video encoder outputs the video stream to an NTSC/PAL display, applying five hardware planes on which a 2D graphical interface may be displayed. The company will demonstrate a prototype single-chip DVD player in the fourth quarter, Sohn said. Until then, OEMs can purchase samples of the OTI-9820 and OTI-9650 chipset for $25, available in a range of PQFP packages. Production will begin in the fall of 2000. Source: Electronic Buyers News