Broadcom Announces AVC/VC-1 Video Coding Chips

Broadcom announced a family of AVC/VC-1 high definition (HD) system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions for cable, satellite and IP set-top boxes and gateway/client architectures. Broadcom has implemented advanced video coding (AVC) (the ITU and ISO joint standard) and VC-1 (the Society for Motion Picture and Television Engineers or SMPTE standard), which employ the latest generation in video compression technology, in the new family of single-chip solutions.


Broadcom's new BCM740x family of single-chip solutions is built upon the company's previous two-chip HD AVC/VC-1 solution featuring the BCM7038 dual-channel HDTV and digital video recorder (DVR) chip and the BCM7411 AVC video decoder/audio processor chip. This BCM7038/BCM7411 two-chip solution is currently shipping in volume production to leading set-top box manufacturers including EchoStar, LG Electronics, Pace, Thomson and Samsung.


France Telecom recently used Broadcom's two-chip solution to deploy a live high definition TV broadcast with MPEG-4 AVC over an ADSL2+ network from the French Open Tennis Tournament at Roland Garros stadium.


The first single-chip AVC/VC-1 HD SoC products available include the BCM7401 and BCM7402. The BCM7401 is targeted at embedded hard disk drive DVR and home gateway applications while the BCM7402 addresses non-DVR or networked DVR client applications. Both chips support the widely adopted H.264 video compression standard (also known as MPEG-4 part 10/AVC) and are also the world's first AVC/VC-1 HD chips to employ integrated secure video processor (SVP) technology. SVP technology provides an open platform for content protection, which enables secure, digital content related interconnectivity between consumer electronic devices over a home network.


Sampling is underway.
http://www.broadcom.com