NEC Electronics Announces World's First DVD Codec with Integrated Digital Set-Top Box

[Gregg Lengling]

Tokyo (JCNN) - NEC Electronics Corporation has announced a new audio-visual (AV) codec, the uPD61171, which integrates digital set-top box (STB) and digital video disk (DVD) recording functions in a single chip.

The newly developed product features fully integrated back-end functions of DVD/hard disk drive (HDD) recorders, providing a cost and space savings by realizing AV compression/decompression and graphics and video encoding, all on one chip.

The new codec incorporates a dual-CPU architecture using the world's highest- performance CPU core for DVD recorders. Two 225-MIPS CPUs are integrated in the chip; one is assigned for audio decompression, while the other provides processing power for user applications, including high-quality graphical user interface (GUI) and networking products.

Two advanced technology attachment (ATA) ports are employed for up to four HDD/DVD drive connections. This dual-ATA feature, with the above-mentioned stream processor capability, supports complicated functions such as time-shifting playback with HDD while programming on a DVD drive.