un super article...le rêve de tout chacun est entrain de se réaliser plûtot que prévu...à moins que Sony ne mêle pas ses patte velues
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/show ... =193501688
SAN FRANCISCO — Machines capable of playing both Blu-ray and HD-DVD disks will emerge next year to short-circuit the format war in next-generation DVD.
Leading chip vendors such as Broadcom, STMicroelectronics and NEC Electronics told EE Times they are developing ICs that allow high-definition optical drives and players to comply with the two competing specifications. These suppliers appear to have specific knowledge that their potential customers—whose names they declined to disclose—will roll out universal players as early as 2007.
Although confused consumers might welcome a box that resolved the incompatibility between HD-DVD (HD) and Blu-ray Disc (BD), its advent could also put a crimp in immediate sales. "Many consumers will hold off buying a next-generation DVD player until the universal player hits the market," said Richard Doherty, research director at the Envisioneering Group (Seaford, N.Y.).
Broadcom Corp. has already shipped the industry's first dual HD/BD decoder chip, designed into the first-generation Toshiba HD-DVD player and into Samsung's Blu-ray Disc player. Broadcom will also make its next-generation platform--a much more highly integrated system-on-chip that is scheduled for announcement soon—comply with both formats, while adding support for BD's latest profile.
Broadcom hopes not only to cover its bets in an uncertain format battle, but also to cater to the emerging market for universal players. Asked whether such boxes will reach the consumer market before the end of 2007, Don Shulsinger, vice president of business development for Broadcom's broadband communications group, said, "We predict that the most successful product will be universal players."
Similarly, Christos Lagomichos, general manager of the Home Entertainment Group at STMicroelectronics, predicted that "a significant volume of high-definition-capable optical-disk players in 2008 will be universal players."
"Except for politically aligned CE companies, many system vendors cannot afford to lose out on such an opportunity," Henry Nurser, DVD business unit manager at ST, said of universal players.
Chris Crotty, an analyst at market research firm iSuppli Corp., also expects consumer electronics vendors to roll out dual-format players by next year.
ST is integrating the latest Blu-ray software changes into its STi7200 chip, originally developed for the set-top market, along with support for the middleware required by HD-DVD and Blu-ray. The chip will be in volume in 2007, Nurser said.
While both Broadcom and ST—for now—offer only the back-end decoder IC for next-generation DVD players, NEC Electronics Corp. last month began sampling a front-end processor chip set that can handle read/write operations for both HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc players.
"It's just a matter of time" before disk drives compatible with both formats hit the market, said Shigeo Niitsu, vice president responsible for system-on chip LSIs for PC peripherals and audio/video digital systems at NEC Electronics. Although no drive vendors have released such combo drives yet, he said, "PC companies like HP are looking for drives that are compatible with both formats. Technically speaking, LSIs for such drives are ready."
According to analyst Doherty, both Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and LG Electronics Inc. last year said they would develop and market universal players. LG at that time even said that it would have one available by this autumn. But both companies later retracted their announcements, and Doherty suspects they did so "after being pressured by Sony."
As leader of the Blu-ray camp, Sony has bet big on that format. Its Playstation 3, due out this month, will be a Blu-ray system. And on the content side, Sony's Columbia Pictures is releasing titles on Blu-ray. Calling the format debate "emotionally charged," Doherty said he believes Sony is urging CE vendors not to develop the universal player, because "it would give HD-DVD credibility."
But from the consumer's point of view, many industry observers think the universal player is a no-brainer. "The market will demand universal players," said Peter Besen, vice president of the consumer electronics group at Broadcom.
And yet the battle between the standards could be decided within weeks, said Doherty, as vendors field sub-$500 players based on one format or the other in time for the holidays."There may be as many as 500,000 Blu-ray players sold in the next month," he said, and "as many as 5 million Playstation 3 game consoles with Blu-ray drives shipped."
Technology issues
For chip manufacturers, meanwhile, making either a front-end or a back-end IC comply with the two competing next-generation DVD formats is no trivial task.
A back-end decoder must be able to handle different operating systems and separate middleware--Java for Blu-ray and Microsoft's HDi for HD. Some HD-DVD players are based on Windows CE, others on Linux. ST's universal player platform, for example, is built on Linux so as to cater to both HD and Blu-ray.
"You need to pay close attention to each spec, anticipate changes in the future and architect a chip with the right partitioning of software and hardware so that there will be a built-in flexibility," said ST's Lagomichos.
Broadcom's Shulsinger said the specs must be compared carefully to ensure that each device supports the more stringent requirements of the two. The specs themselves can be a moving target. Blu-ray Profile 2, for example, requires the system to connect to the Internet and decode two video streams. The chip decodes the primary stream in high definition and the second either in standard or high def, though dual HD streams may soon be required. That would mean "adding more memory to a chip," Shulsinger said.
More difficult challenges include cases in which one format supports items that the other doesn't, Shulsinger said. For example, both formats support the Advanced Access Content System, but Blu-ray requires an additional layer of encryption, known as BD+. An even bigger hurdle is the different programming environments. "It's the underlying software infrastructure that requires the huge effort" to make the decoder chip's software robust enough to work properly in both environments, Shulsinger said.
Both ST and Broadcom plan to enter the front-end IC business as well. ST is working with a Japanese chip vendor that supplies ICs for optical drives. Broadcom is considering partnering with another vendor strong in the optical drive market. It's inevitable that a DSP and the analog chips used in the front end will be integrated into the back-end decoder IC, said Shulsinger.
The optical side looms as a daunting technical issue. "The bottleneck is optical units," said NEC's Niitsu.
Either a dual-format optical pickup unit or two separate optical pickup units would be necessary for any universal player, said iSuppli's Crotty, because each format stores information at a different depth on the disk.
Ricoh, for one, is developing an objective lens that can read and write disks of both formats. NEC has developed a front-end chip set consisting of two processors: the µPC3360, an analog signal processor that controls the optical pickup and reads out data from disks, and the µPD63410, a digital signal processor for data processing such as error correction.
NEC's chip set is designed to control read/write operations and process data from all the disks of 16 formats, including Blu-ray, HD-DVD, standard DVD and CDs.
ST's Nurser predicted that the cost delta for dual drives will become "very low" in 2007. Asked how much, he declined to comment, noting that he received the information under a nondisclosure agreement.
Envisioneering's Doherty also believes that the difference in price for dual drives is relatively minimal. "It's mostly royalties" for each format, he said.
,ca tombe bien ,je suis Francais 
Créé le 10 Mar 2007 19:43
