Texas Instruments launches pioneering Digital Video Platform in Korea, as digital video is tipped as the next major growth sector in the market Simplifying digital video innovation, Texas Instruments last month today announced the Korean launch of its its DaVincitechnology. After being first announced September 8, 2005 it was launched simultaneously worldwide in the same week before Christmas 2005. The new products include two digital signal processor- (DSP) based system-on-chips (SoC), multimedia codecs, application programming interfaces (APIs), frameworks and development tools, and all are optimized to enable innovation for digital video systems. These integrated components are the industry first complete offering of an open platform to enable digital video innovation without requiring extensive digital video expertise. With these DaVinci products, adding digital video to an application becomes as simple as writing to an API, saving original equipment manufacturers months of development time and lowering overall system costs. "DaVinci technology gives developers flexible combinations of components to quickly create high-performance and p r o d u c t i o n - t e s t e d designs without getting bogged down in the details of video implementation,said Greg Mar, DSP SoC platform manager, TI. "DaVinci technology will be implemented into a wide variety of applications, such as videophones, video security systems, and innovative devices that will take advantage of easy digital video implementation.Mar pointed out that the fact that Da Vinci's interoperability, supporting all standards makes it particularly well-suited to Korea's diverse and innovative IT market. He sees digital video as the next big growth sector in the market, with its wide range of applications in telematics, CCTV and so forth. TI has made this possible by eliminating the complexity of digital video through the integration of hardware and software, allowing developers to build upon existing, production-tested software components optimized for digital video. With the first of many DaVinci products from TI, digital video will be as easy to implement as an off-theshelf component. "Texas Instruments DaVinci technology is very clearly a landmark in consumer electronics, said Chris Crotty, senior consumer electronics analyst, iSuppli Corporation. We've had an audio revolution; a video revolution is the next step in consumer electronics. It looks like TI is taking care of everything and providing a very complete solution for developers that will enable digital video innovation and the next generation of consumer video devices. DaVinci Processors Reduce System Cost The TMS320DM644x architecture is a highly integrated system-on-chip (SoC) that has absorbed many of the external components required for digital video, dropping hardware bill of materials by as much as 50 percent. The DM644x devices are based on TI's performance-leading TMS320C64x+.DSP core, an ARM926 processor, video accelerators, networking peripherals and external memory/storage interfaces all specifically tuned for video. The TMS320DM6443, tuned for video decode applications, provides all of the processing components required to decode digital video, including both analog and digital video output with integrated resizer and on-screen display (OSD) engines. The TMS320DM6446, tuned for video encode and decode applications, adds video encoding capabilities through a dedicated video processing front end capable of capturing various digital video formats. Software Infrastructure Speeds Time to Market The complete DaVinci software infrastructure, from low-level OS drivers to application APIs, makes it possible for developers to implement digital video without having to focus resources on writing and optimizing codecs or programming a DSP. Initially, based on the Linux Operating System, APIs mask the complex hardware and software details of implementing codecs from developers, enabling them to interchange multimedia codecs without having to modify application code. Optimized video and audio codecs are also available for free evaluation and licensing from TI to simplify and speed customer design and decision-making. When creating applications, developers are able to write to industryrecognized APIs for storage, networking and video interfaces leveraging standard OS development environments. OEMs are still empowered to access and develop directly on the DSP and ARM should they choose. The result is that developers are able to take advantage of the SoC's performance and focus on developing their own value-added features. Texas Instruments Incorporated provides innovative DSP and analog technologies to meet our customers' realworld signal processing requirements. In addition to Semiconductors, the company's businesses include Sensors & Controls, and Educational & Productivity Solutions. TI is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and has manufacturing, design or sales operations in more than 25 countries. For more information on these new DaVinci products, see http://www.ti. com/thedavincieffectpr.