Silicon Image's Digital Video Processor Powers New Progressive Scan DVD Players From Denon, Ayre Acoustics And Camelot

SiIô 503ô Digital Video Format Converter Optimizes Video Performance In An Affordable Single-Chip Solution

7-Feb-01

Silicon Image, Inc. (NASDAQ: SIMG), a price/performance leader in high bandwidth semiconductor solutions for mass markets, announced that its SiIô 503ô digital video processing chip has been designed into a number of new high performance progressive scan DVD players, including the Denon DVD-2800, Ayre Acoustics D-1 and Camelot Roundtable. According to Cahners In-Stat Group, DVDs will continue as the fastest growing consumer electronics product in history, with sales reaching new heights over the next few years. Specifically, the high tech market research firm noted that the DVD market has grown from nothing in 1996 to more than 28 million units expected to ship worldwide in 2001. In-Stat expects the market to exceed 60 million units in 2004 and went on further to note that new features all point to rapid market growth. Progressive scan capability is one of these newer features. Standard interlaced TV images consist of 480 horizontal scan lines, requiring two top-to-bottom passes of the scanning beam to display these images on a TV screen. This reduces the visual quality, particularly on large-screen TVs. In contrast, progressively-scanned images are drawn at twice this rate - eliminating visible scan lines, flicker and other motion and interlacing artifacts such as jagged edges and shimmering horizontal lines. Silicon Image's SiI 503 chip solution converts standard interlaced images to progressive images. This de-interlacing process is not only suitable for DVD players but also for other applications demanding high quality image processing, such as set-top boxes, high definition TVs, A/V monitors and video projectors. David Birch-Jones, Denon Marketing Manager, stated, ""Denon's philosophy is to introduce products that represent genuine technical advancement. When designing the DVD-2800, our first progressive scan player, we wanted to ensure it offered the most advanced video processing technology available. Silicon Image's Pure Progressiveô scan conversion technology was the answer. The SiI 503 offers unparalleled video processing performance along with a host of advanced features and capabilities. We're pleased to be able to offer consumers a truly high performance progressive scan player at an affordable price point."" Charles Hansen, Vice President of Engineering for Ayre Acoustics noted, ""Ayre's reputation demands that our products deliver the absolute highest performance level. This makes the SiI 503 de-interlacer the perfect choice for the Ayre D-1 DVD player. The SiI 503 provides flawless reconstruction of original film frames, even when confronted with improperly mastered discs. Its motion-adaptive de-interlacing yields superlative results for DVDs transferred from video sources. And to top it off, the SiI 503's capability of handling NTSC, PAL and SECAM video standards lets us deliver the same high performance package to our customers worldwide."" The SiI 503 is based on Silicon Image's DVDO advanced video image processing technology. A highly integrated, single-chip solution, the SiI 503 features a de-interlacer, horizontal scaler, color lookup table, chroma upsampler, memory controller, color space converter and LCD/CRT controller. Advanced motion adaptive and source adaptive techniques create an output image of incredible detail without introducing the motion and interlacing artifacts commonly associated with other interlace-to-progressive scan converters. The SiI 503 conducts real-time computation at more than six billion arithmetic operations per second, fast enough to provide seamless, artifact-free image quality regardless of the processing demands of the video program material. An advanced cubic interpolating de-interlacer with Four-Field Processing detects and corrects motion artifacts on a pixel-by-pixel basis, as opposed to other systems that utilize full-frame detection. This results in remarkably clear and flicker-free pictures. The SiI 503's Source Adaptive Processing provides automatic, seamless detection of video sources, whether they be film, video or graphics masters, and Source Transition Management provides smooth transitions between these source types. Setting the SiI 503 apart from other de-interlacing solutions, its proprietary diagonal processing, transition management and post-processing technologies produce high quality images from even the most noisy and unstable sources. Michael Kelley, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for Silicon Image noted, ""These design wins from high end manufacturers firmly establish our presence in the progressive scan DVD market. The SiI 503 offers the best price/performance in video processing, and DVD manufacturers and reviewers alike have recognized its merits. Simply put, there is no other chip on the market offering this high caliber performance at such an affordable price."" The Denon DVD-2800 will be available this month, joining the Ayre D-1 and the Camelot Roundtable. Other progressive scan DVD players featuring the SiI 503 from Enlightened Audio Designs (EAD), Arcam and Theta Digital are currently in production. For more information about Silicon Image, visit www.siimage.com.

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