GEC Plessey Semiconductors Ltd has decided to try its hand at imaging and graphics devices. In this area, the company has just announced a range of system analogue-to-digital and multi-purpose digital-to-analogue converters aimed at the emerging multimedia and graphics markets. GEC Plessey has also announced three new products for video compression. Referring to a Dataquest survey, GEC Plessey anticipates that its market opportunities for silicon components will be strongly oriented towards graphics and multimedia applications – the latter sector growing particularly between 1994 and 1996 to being a $500m-a-year industry. But GEC Plessey, in the short term, refers to professional personal computer-based multimedia applications, since consumer multimedia, such as CD-I and CDTV, will almost certainly take some time to gain market acceptance. Applications-wise, market researcher Micro Multimedia forecasts that 23% of the $13,000m multimedia market in 1994 will be given to entertainment, 13% to education and training, and 11% to publishing – the rest being split between design and simulation, advertising and special effects. Geographically, Dataquest Inc apportions 49% of the $65,000m imaging and graphics equipment market in 1990 to North America, 34% to Western Europe, 12% to Asia/Pacific, including Japan, and 5% to the rest of the world. The new analogue-to-digital and digital-to-analogue converters are based on low-cost CMOS, high speed and mixed signal bipolar technologies. The SP94308 is an 8-bit 20MHz Video System analogue-to-digital converter, enabling digitisation at the standard digital video clock speed of three times colour sub-carrier with analogue bandwidths of over 6MHz. For satellite systems requiring wider bandwidth, GEC Plessey has the SP973T8 8-bit 30MHz Flash analogue-to-digital converter. For higher sampling rates, there is a range of 110MHz Flash analogue-to-digital converters – the 4-bit SP97504, the 6-bit SP97506 and the 8-bit SP97508 devices. The SP97508 is pin-compatible with the Sony CX20116, Honeywell HADC77100 and Datel ADC303, but offers a wider analogue bandwidth. The VP1058 is a 25MHz 8-bit Flash Video analogue-to-digital pin-compatible equivalent to the TRW TDC1058 converter – GEC Plessey is second-sourcing TRW Inc’s technology, as well as Philips Electronics NV’s technology. Later this year, the SP97608 8-bit 300MHz Flash converter will be available, enabling ultra-high speed and accurate sampling. Also for release by the year end, is the VP8708 analogue input-output system, positioned against the Philips TDA8708. The triple 6-bit VP136 Image Capture System on a single chip will be out later in the year. The new digital-to-analogue converters are to include the VP101 triple 8-bit video converter which will sample at 30MHz or 50MHz clock rates, being positioned against the Brooktree Corp BT101. This is targeted at the professional video market and multimedia image capture systems. The 30MHz MV95338 is a lower cost variant, suitable for satellite television encoder-decoder systems. The 30MHz MV95308 and 50MHz MV95408 8-bit video converters are suitable for single digital-to-analogue video graphics and general digital television applications. For higher sampling rates, the low-cost ZN515 8-bit 100MHz video converter or the ZN455 triple 4-bit memory converters are appropriate. The 8-bit emitter-coupled logic SP98608 bipolar converter clocks at 450MHz for satellite communications, video capture, multimedia and real-time instrumentation. The 250MHz triple 8-bit video converter VP109 and 125MHz 8-bit VP458 are Brooktree-compatible products. For the video compression market, GEC Plessey has announced the VP2611 Integrated H261 encoder and the VP2615 reconstruction processor for video conferencing, the VP550 video compression processor for storage compression, and several general support devices. The complex VP2611 chip will sample in February, at a cost of UKP130 for 1,000-piece quantities, and the low cost VP550 will sample in a year’s time for an introductory price of UKP60 – UKP10 in high volume.$
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