Bringing High Definition to a New High

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Sean Mota

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By Ann Steffora Mutschler -- Electronic News, 9/7/2005

While we all want our high definition TV, we want certain features and, of course, the best picture quality possible. One consumer electronics-focused IC supplier, Freiburg, Germany-based Micronas, recently unveiled an integrated IC family that it says takes HDTV picture quality on LCD and plasma TVs to a new high.

Optimized for advanced flat-panel display TVs, Micronas’ VGC 596xB family of dual-channel video and graphics controllers supports full HDTV resolution with two fully independent channels that allow the screen to display two images side-by-side, as double window, picture-in-picture (PIP), or as picture-and-text, while preserving full image resolution and optimizing picture quality.


Peter Kliegelhoefer, product marketing manager for Micronas’ consumer products said the ICs contain two complete signal paths, designed for optimum image quality and are what allow for both standard definition and HD signal processing, both at highest quality level, along with PC signal processing that supports various PC formats.

“The dual signal paths also allow applications such as double window and PIP to be realized. For composite video baseband signals, two color decoders are integrated into the VGC-B, eliminating the need for any external color decoder with positive impact on the bill-of-materials as well as PCB space,” Kliegelhoefer explained.

Picture quality is achieved with a combination of technologies such as dynamic contrast enhancement, luminance and chrominance sharpness enhancement, selective color enhancement, non-linear color-space enhancement and content-adaptive temporal noise reduction. All of these are available for both channels independently and support either LCD or plasma display panels, the company said.

With a 32bit MIPS processor at its core, the VGC 596xB allows the end user the ability to controlling the TV set, while software-driven features can be added to allow a flash memory device to be plugged in to watch digital camera snapshots in full HD resolution on their TV.

To reduce development time and effort, hardware and software are performance-optimized around a real-time operating system, and Micronas provides a flat-panel display TV software package including middleware and a suite of high level drivers and applications.

“To overcome the response time weaknesses of today’s LCD panels, Micronas’ IC family allows high-contrast LCD viewing with significantly reduced motion blur based on higher frame rates than today’s 60 frames per second,” Kliegelhoefer added.

Two 10-bit color decoders and two 10-bit 1080i motion-adaptive frame-based de-interlacers and scalers provide video fidelity. De-interlacing can be further enhanced by combining the VGC 596xB with Micronas’ truD technology, included in the Micronas FRC 9429A. truD provides enhanced real motion features, motion vector-based de-interlacing and film de-juddering.

The VGC 596xB meets all requirements for the European HD-Ready label. For the U.S. and Korean markets, Micronas said it has an ATSC-compliant HDTV solution proposal based on Micronas’ DRX 3942H ATSC front-end device family in combination with an MPEG decoder.

Two versions of the IC are sampling now, VGC 5969B for HDTV 1080p panels and the VGC 5968B for WXGA panels. Both versions are pin and software compatible, enabling scalable TV applications with only one PCB design.

Evaluation boards, development tools and a TV software package including a flat-panel display TV application example will be available.

Watch for several major TV makers to implement the IC in products in Q1 next year, Micronas concluded.
 
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