Oak Technology Inc has won design-ins from Fujitsu Ltd, Hewlett-Packard Co and Hitachi Ltd for its PM-44+ iDSP digital signal processing chip as the imaging engine for high-end scanners and digital copiers. Fujitsu will use the chip in its M3090 series departmental and production scanners. HP will use the chip for its Mopier 240 Network Copier, the second Mopier with a lower price point than the original Mopier 320. Hitachi Ltd ‘s Koko Koki Imaging Solutions Inc division, formed out of the 1990 acquisition of digital printer firm Dataproducts Corp, will use it in the DDS32 digital copier, its first entry into the copier channel.
Oak recently agreed to acquire Xionics Document Technologies Inc for around $74m, in a bid to shift its business towards embedded systems for networked offices. It plans to combine Xionics’ embedded software with its PixelMagic image processors and compression technologies. Oak acquired the programmable digital signal processing technology from Pixel Magic Inc for $10m in 1995 (CI No 2,785). The business has risen as its traditional CD-ROM controller business has declined.
International Data Corp sizes the printer and multiple-function peripheral market, worth $16.6 billion in 1997, will be worth over $30 billion by 2002. It says the growth is largely due to a shift in office printing from print then distribute” to “distribute then print” models. Emerging technologies such as internet faxing will accelerate this trend further, says IDC.
