Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE:PHG)(AEX:PHI) announced that it is the first and only company to provide the total semiconductor system solution for the advanced consumer DVD+R/+RW recorder market.

Philips Nexperia(TM) reference design, complete with back-end and front-end integrated circuits (ICs), and optical pickup unit (OPU), will allow high-end consumer electronics (CE) manufacturers to rapidly develop advanced DVD+R/+RW recorders for the consumer audio/video (A/V) market at competitive price points. This latest offering completes Philips' DVD+R/+RW reference design portfolio, as highlighted by a number of recent Philips' announcements targeted at both the consumer A/V and personal computing (PC) data markets.

"As the DVD recorder market hits the mainstream, price and performance will be the primary drivers for consumer adoption and companies such as Philips are providing the end-to-end technology to meet those requirements," said Michelle Abraham, senior analyst at leading industry research firm In-Stat/MDR. "Similar to the DVD player market, we predict a rapid growth of DVD recorders in the digital living room over the next few years, with DVD recorder volumes expected to surpass 27 million units by 2006."

Philips Nexperia DVD+R/+RW reference design is the first system solution offering CE manufacturers the technology, hardware and software necessary to quickly and cost-effectively introduce advanced DVD+R/+RW recorders into the consumer A/V market. The DVD+R/+RW reference design is based on a front-end solution built around the Nexperia pnx7850 processor and an OPU manufactured by Philips. The back-end solution is built upon the Nexperia pnx7100, a single-chip AVG (Audio, Video, Graphics) MPEG2 CODEC. The complete design presents a highly integrated solution that is optimized to meet the stringent cost, performance and recording requirements making it an ideal solution for the home living room environment.

"As the only company to have highly integrated chipsets for both the optical video recorder engine as well the MPEG back-end, Philips is driving down the system costs for our customers to promote rapid market penetration of DVD recorders," said Jeroen Keunen, general manager for consumer and multimedia, Philips Semiconductors. "Furthermore, the solution is in compliance with the DVD+RW standard, which is the most solid and compatible of all DVD formats and is primed to be the winning industry format moving forward."

The newest Philips Nexperia video recorder system solution completes the company's overall DVD+R/+RW portfolio of semiconductor solutions. Earlier in the year, Philips introduced the pnx7100, an MPEG2 CODEC targeted for laser disk- and hard disk-based digital recording systems (May 20). Philips then recently announced a value turnkey reference design geared towards second-tier CE manufacturers featuring the pnx7100 as one of the key building blocks (October 22), as well as unveiled a front-end solution for high-performance PC DVD video recorders (November 4). Now Philips is providing a highly reliable DVD+R/+RW solution, combining both its front-end and back-end semiconductor expertise, for top-tier CE manufacturers.

Pricing and Availability

Samples of the Philips Nexperia DVD+R/+RW system solution, which includes the front-end chipset around the pnx7850 processor and Philips OPU, and a back-end chipset around the pnx7100 are available now. Volume production is scheduled for Q1 2003. Component pricing is $100.00 USD at volumes of 100,000 units.