SICAN Debuts Advanced System Cores for Video Conferencing and Acceleration.SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO South San Francisco, city (1990 pop. 54,312), San Mateo co., W Calif.; inc. 1908. South San Francisco has several industrial parks; its manufactures include medical supplies and equipment, foods, paint, paper products, consumer goods, and clothing. , Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 26, 1997-- SICAN Microelectronics recently introduced two new members of its Video DesignObject(TM) core library, the Video Conferencing Hybrid Accelerator (VCHA VCHA Volusia County Hispanic Association ) and the High Performance Video Accelerator (HPVA HPVA Hardwood Plywood and Veneer Association HPVA Human Powered Vehicle Association HPVA Houston Professional Videographers Association (Houston, TX) HPVA High-Pressure Vapor Annealing (semiconductor manufacturing) ). Designed for varying levels of system performance for video applications, these IC Cores -- dubbed Standard DesignObjects(TM) -- cooperate with a main processor. This processor can be either a DSP (1) (Digital Signal Processor) A special-purpose CPU used for digital signal processing applications (see definition #2 below). It provides ultra-fast instruction sequences, such as shift and add, and multiply and add, which are commonly used in math-intensive or RISC/CISC type CPU CPU in full central processing unit Principal component of a digital computer, composed of a control unit, an instruction-decoding unit, and an arithmetic-logic unit. , preferably equipped with a multimedia-enhanced instruction set. Computing-bound steps in the video encoding/ decoding process will be offloaded from the CPU and performed on the VCHA or HPVA hardware. DesignObjects(TM) reduce turnaround times for highly complex systems-on-silicon developments by offering core technology which can be tailored to meet customer specifications. The VCHA, tailored to accelerate video processing in low-cost applications, is configurable to decode MPEG-1 streams in real-time or to encode and decode H.26x videophone sequences. In both applications, it performs inverse discrete cosine transformation (IDCT IDCT Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform IDCT Inverse Discrete Cosinus Transformation ) and block-oriented operations for motion estimation and motion compensation. The VCHA works together with a digital signal processor A digital signal processor (DSP) is a specialized microprocessor designed specifically for digital signal processing, generally in real-time computing. Characteristics of typical Digital Signal Processors
The HPVA for high performance video applications performs an expanded suite of operations on compressed and decompressed video data. The functions performed by the HPVA include decoding of the stream to the block layer, inverse quantization (1) The division of a range of values into a single number, code or classification. For example, class A is 0 to 999, class B is 1000 to 9999 and class C is 10000 and above. (2) In analog to digital conversion, the assignment of a number to the amplitude of a wave. and IDCT. After these operations are programmed by a DSP, the HPVA directly processes the corresponding data blockwise out of the memory. For the encoding process, the HPVA can be switched to a mode that performs the necessary operations for DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) An algorithm that is widely used for data compression. Similar to Fast Fourier Transform, DCT converts data (pixels, waveforms, etc.) into sets of frequencies. The first frequencies in the set are the most meaningful; the latter, the least. , quantization and variable length encoding. "Processor developers have recently incorporated useful multimedia enhancements into their instruction sets. However, the total processing power still does not satisfy the needs of compute- intensive multimedia applications, especially for video processing. With SICAN's comprehensive DesignObject(TM) Libraries, our customers achieve customized developments faster by integrating tested RTL (Register Transfer Level) A high-level hardware description language (HDL) for defining digital circuits. The circuits are described as a collection of registers, Boolean equations, control logic such as "if-then-else" statements as well as complex event sequences; source code into their application. "Our additional design services make sure that the experts are available and ready to assist customers in every stage of implementation," said Frank Schirrmeister, Department Manager of Media Chip Technology at SICAN GmbH. Based on system-level experience, SICAN assists customers in defining a balanced partitioning scheme between software and hardware, in order to optimize the performance of both the DesignObjects(TM) within the silicon implementation and the overall system. DesignObjects(TM) are the cornerstone of SICAN's intellectual property. Each DesignObject(TM) consists of documentation, synthesizable RTL source code, application training and test benches for appropriate verification. The integration of DesignObjects(TM) reduces time-to-market for new products and applications by eliminating the need to redevelop modules that perform a common set of calculations. SICAN GmbH is headquartered in Hannover, Germany, with a U.S. subsidiary, SICAN Microelectronics in S. San Francisco, CA. SICAN is a microelectronics design company specializing in communications, multimedia and networking applications. Its technical staff and infrastructure form an organization with the flexibility and innovation to meet the rapidly changing design needs of its customers. Founded in 1990, SICAN focuses its design projects around the integration of reusable core technology-DesignObjects(TM) into customer-specific solutions, thereby improving the quality of customer designs as well as reducing time-to-market. -0- Note to Editors: All SICAN press releases are available on SICAN's web site at http://www.sican-micro.com . SICAN's web site also provides information on the company's services, news and events. CONTACT: SICAN Microelectronics Corp. Stefan Tamme, 415/871-1494 info@sican-micro.com or HTE HTE Hírközlési És Informatikai Tudományos Egyesület (Hungary) HTE High Temperature Electronics HTE HazMat Trucking Enforcer (software) HTE HighTech Engineering HTE High Tension Electrode HTE High Turnover of Employees Research Steve Z. Szirom, 415/871-4377 szirom@hte-sibs.com |
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