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NEC Electronics Corporation (TSE:6723) today announced a new DVD recorder codec IC family that offers affordable and flexible single-chip solutions for developing low-cost DVD recorders.

The new products build on NEC Electronics' uPD61181 -- the industry's first DVD recorder codec IC to integrate all necessary functions for back-end audio video processing on a single chip, introduced in March -- offering flexibility and features to support development of products targeted for the growing market for low-end DVD recorder applications.

Compared to the uPD61181, the new four-product family:

- Reduces pin count by approximately 35 percent (from 449 pins to 292 pins), reducing bill-of-materials
- Un-bundles the IEEE1394 A/V link controller and offering it as an optional element, eliminating unnecessary costs for applications that do not require it
- Shifts certain video display functions from hardware to software, reducing chip size and costs
- Allows pin multiplexing between the general purpose I/O port, ATA interface and IEEE interface, offering greater flexibility
- Offers a significant decrease in sample pricing, from US$100, to US$55

The combination of the above features decreases costs and offers greater flexibility to system developers, facilitating the development of low-end DVD recorder applications.

In addition to supporting MPEG1 and MPEG2, the uPD61177/8 also support playback of DivX(r) Video, a type of MPEG4 compression format, with the addition of DivX decoding functions to the video decoder. All four products incorporate two MIPS32(r) 4KE tm CPU cores, which offer superior performance with low power consumption, helping the four products to decrease power consumption by approximately 50 percent from 3.0w to 1.5w. Other product features include doubled sampling rate of the video DAC (from 54MHz to 108MHz for a 10-bit sample size), as well as dual stream processors.

The product family will be on display at CEATEC Japan, starting October 5, 2004 at Makuhari Messe.

Pricing and Availability
Samples of the uPD611715, uPD611716, uPD611717 and uPD611718 will be available beginning December 1, 2004, priced at US$55 each. Mass production is scheduled to begin in March 2005. Aggregate production volume for the four products is expected to reach 500,000 units per month. Pricing and availability are subject to change.