Published:
05-Aug-08
NEC Electronics has developed a single-chip solution which it claims supports all the functions required for Blu-ray Disc (BD) playback whilst halving the size of the board required by conventional chips. Sample shipments of the EMMA 3PF chip are scheduled to start in September 2008. NEC anticipates monthly production of 1m units from fourth quarter 2008 at a reported cost of ¥15,000 ($139) per unit.
The LSI (large scale integration) circuit chip is the first to combine all BD functions in a single unit, including reading analogue data from optical discs and converting to digital, digital encoding of sound and images and HDMI output to HDTV sets. It is BD Profile 2.0 compatible, supporting picture-in-picture playback and network connections, and it has a multi-core CPU and a graphic processing accelerator. The dramatic reduction in size reflects the fact that it integrates external memory and internalises peripheral functions.
Our take...
This development brings the emergence of a viable sub-$200 BD player another step closer and will thus be welcomed by the video industry. It also edges NEC ahead of rivals such as Matsushita Electric, Broadcom and Sigma Designs, increasing the likelihood of the company achieving its stated aim of securing 40% of the global BD chip market by March 2009 and over half by March 2011. According to Screen Digest data, over 40m BD players and recorders will be sold in the key world regions of North America, Europe and Japan alone in calendar years 2008-2010, a figure that could increase if hardware prices fall faster than anticipated. NEC claims that the new chip will also play an important role in facilitating the integration of BD playback functionality into other audio-visual systems.
