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Jim Barthold
The combined efforts of Equator Technolo-gies Inc. and Hitachi Ltd. have produced a third generation Media Accelerated Proces-sor for Consumer Appliances (MAP-CA) the companies hope will change the course of digital TV.
The single-chip solution is designed for multimedia products such as interactive set-tops, digital TVs, videoconferencing systems, medical imaging products, digital video editing equipment and office automation imaging products, Equator said.
It is "the fastest device that we have to date. It's fast enough to do standard definition television video time shifting so that personal video recorders can be built in software, rather than hardware," explained John Setel O'Donnell, Equator's co-founder/president.
Because the MAP-CA will sell for $40, it'll impact the whole DTV business, O'Donnell said.
"Today there are approximately 1.6 billion television sets. In a couple years we can look forward to every one of them being connected to the Internet," he predicted. "A software platform for delivering the core functions of the television will allow those TV sets to keep up with the Internet to deliver cutting edge services and the highest quality."
O'Donnell compared the impact to that of digital signal processors (DSPs) on modems and cell phones.
"As DSPs moved into communications products, they've replaced hard wired devices that had previously carried out the core computations, core modulation functions of those communications products," he explained.
This gave manufacturers the ability "to move their core intellectual property from custom hardware into software to accelerate the pace of change in their products."
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