Sigma Designs Inc has teamed with Texas Instruments Inc to become the first to implement the Zoomed Video Port promising to bring motion video to laptops. The specification was approved by the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association in March. It is a connection between a PC Card (formerly known as a PCMCIA card) and host system that enables the card to write video directly to the VGA controller. Video data is transferred with no buffering requirements because it is transferred over the Zoomed Video bus and not the system bus – lowering the cost of hardware-decoded MPEG, live video capture or authoring, and even phone or ISDN videoconferencing. Sigma and Texas have collaborated to offer a production-ready combination using Sigma’s REALmagic Explorer chip set on the PC Card and the Texas PCI1130 PCI-to-CardBus Controller on the notebook. They said tests of the system by both companies has proved positive and confirmed the existence of problem-free communication between the two chips.
