February 17, 1998 (TOKYO) -- Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. said that it will start sample shipments in June of a low- power MPEG2 encoder microchip targeted at DVD-Video recording/playback products and PC applications.

MPEG2 refers to the Moving Picture Expert Group 2.

The chip's power supply voltage is 1.8V or 3.3V, and maximum power consumption at 1.8V is 0.95W. It has a chip area of 100 sq. mm, where circuits such as motion detection, discrete cosine transform (DCT), inverse DCT, quantization, inverse quantization and variable-length coding are integrated. The IC complies with the MP@ML of the MPEG2 standard.

Although several companies, including NEC Corp. and Sony Corp. have already introduced single-chip MPEG2 encoders, each of them consumes more than 1W.

The new IC was jointly developed by Matsushita Electric Industrial, Matsushita Research Institute Tokyo, Inc. and Matsushita Electronics Corp. It will be manufactured using 0.25- micron CMOS process technology. The microchip will use a 208-pin quad flat package (QFP).

It will be priced at 20,000 yen (US$160), Matsushita said.



(Nikkei Microdevices)