Horizon Semiconductors announced the availability of the a universal System-On-a-Chip (SoC) solution enabling dual channel native 1080/60p decoding, encoding and transcoding for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players/recorders. Horizon's Hz7120 HD-DVD/Blu-Ray SoC supports wide range of features including conformance to video compression standards such as native high-definition 1080/60i & 1080/60p profiles of AVC/H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2 and DV/HDV, audio compression standards such as DTS-HD, Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD, as well as HD-DVD and Blu-Ray HDi and BD-J (BD-Java) interactive technologies.

The Hz7120 is provided with a software stack compliant with both Blu-ray & HD DVD specifications, and a reference hardware platform designed to accelerate OEM/ODM development cycle.

The Hz7120 integrates a variety of technologies such as:

- Multi stream decoder and encoder engines, supporting real-time dual channel HD decoding simultaneously with HD encoding/transcoding, using compression standards including:

- H.264 (AVC) Main and High Profile up to Level 4.2, VC-1 (SMPTE 421M), Advanced Profile @ Level 3, DV, HDV, MPEG-2 MP@HL and MPEG-4 at resolutions up to 1080/60p (1920x1080, 60 frames/sec) and bit rates of up to 50Mbps per channel, compliant with the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray optical disc formats.

- Display processor enabling multiple plane true color blending and HD Picture-in-Picture (PiP), flexible resizing, motion adaptive high-definition de-interlacing, and motion-compensated picture enhancement.

- High definition (1920x1080), powerful 2D and 3D graphics accelerator with dedicated high definition sub-picture decoder and font rendering engines, supporting all HD-DVD and Blu-Ray graphics modes as well as popular graphics standards such as X Windows System and OpenGL.

- Still image decoder & Thomson Multimedia's Film Grain Technology (FGT) accelerators, compliant with HD-DVD specifications.

- Multi-channel multi-format audio encoder, decoder and special audio effects processor, supporting all HD-DVD and Blu-Ray standards and operational modes such as: Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, DD+ to DD conversion, Dolby TrueHD, DTS/DTS-HD, MPEG1 Layer I and II, MP3, HE-AAC v2, WMA pro, simultaneous primary and secondary stream decoding/encoding in up to 7.1 channels per stream, mixing, down mixing and Karaoke.

- High performance application CPU with MMU dedicated exclusively for running standard operating systems such as Linux or Microsoft Windows-CE as well as enabling customer's specific applications, in addition to a dedicated co-processor designed to materially offload the main application CPU.

- Multi-stream high bandwidth transport processor, designed to process program & transport streams from DVD, HDD or IP network. - Wide variety of connectivity and peripherals including 10/100/1G Ethernet, USB 2.0, IDE/ATAPI, SMPTE-292, Flash, I2C, SPI/SSI, UART and others.

- DVI/HDMI output with integrated HDCP security.

- IEEE 1394 (FireWire) with integrated DTCP security supporting direct camcorder & digital movie camera content streaming.

- iVDR interface with integrated SAFIA content protection scheme.

- IR & UHF Remote control processor supporting IR/UHF keyboard and IR-Blaster.

- Security processor with embedded secure OTP memory, enabling complete content protection in strict compliance with the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray standards such as AACS and BD+, as well as numerous other CA/DRM schemes commonly used in the consumer electronics environment.

- Easy to use API, with the ability to accelerate and off-load host application code, as well as comprehensive universal optical disc (UOD) software stack supporting legacy & advanced blue laser disk profiles.

Horizon is also announced the availability of the HzR7120 reference design kit. This HD-DVD/Blu-ray development system includes software support for legacy & advanced blue-laser disk profiles, as well as PCB schematics and documentation.