2005 HDTV Report, Part 15: HDTV IC Chips

[Rodolfo]

This part 15 deals with HDTV IC chips, the information is dated as of 1Q05 from the HDTV technology report and some recent events are to be included on the 2006 document. Companies seem to be going in and out of the LCoS business, on Aug 2004, Intel announced a delay on their plans to release their first LCoS chip for projection sets. Their competitor, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., was continuing as planned. Intel anticipated that the chip would not be ready by the end of 2004, as announced at CES 2004 in January. There were no technical problems reported as the reason of the decision. Later in October 2004, Intel announced that was canceling the plans to produce LCoS chips. On Oct 04, Philips announced that it has decided to discontinue their LCoS business with engines and RPTV, the company indicated that it had invested approximately $200 million in LCoS, the RPTV market was too small, and is not willing to increase the investment for the company to compete with these products. Operations were planned to stop on November 19, 2004. On the other hand, JVC's DILA and Sony's SXRD versions of LCoS continue strong with excellent quality products, Brillian is also into the competition. Silicon Optix joined (and later bought) Teranex to implement a video processor in a single chip called Realta HQV (Hollywood Quality Video). The chip is a programmable DSP that can perform one trillion operations per second and is able to upconvert 1080i to 1080p at up to 120 fps. The technology HQV was developed by Teranex and previously used in professional products costing $60000 and up. It employs pixel-by-pixel processing, scaling, detail enhancement, etc and is fully programmable for receiving future firmware upgrades. HQV has won fourth awards since its introduction in the 4Q04, and the Best of Innovations CES 2005 award. Regarding DLP chips, on December 2004, TI announced that they have already reached their 5 million mark of sold products using their DLP technology. According to TI, in perspective, it took 5 years to reach the first million (until December 2001), two additional years to reach the two million mark (until August 2003), by March 2004 the three million (six months later), and 4 months later the fourth million mark. With CRT going gradually out, other than panels, a chip might be in your future.

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