Product category:
Reference Designs
News Release from: Micronas USA | Subject: VCT-Premium
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 24 August 2007
New generation TV processor released
The VCT-Premium further improves picture quality by dealing with noise associated with digital TV.
Micronas has released VCT-Premium, the third generation of its VCT-family of single-chip flat-panel TV processors Major OEMs all over the world have chosen the VCT-platform for their LCD and plasma TVs
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 4 Oct 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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Now, the TV market is moving to Full HD 1080p panels, and the VCT-Premium offers the industry's highest level of integration, allowing TV-OEMs significant system cost reduction at state of the art quality to address this important market segment.
The single-chip solution provides the complete electronics platform for a Full HD 1080p TV featuring integrated audio, video, Teletext, OSD, and controller-related functionalities, even memory and program ROM, and a dual input port HDMI receiver.
The VCT-Premium has been engineered for maximum picture and sound quality.
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The chip offers state of the art colour processing: In addition to standard colour space typically used for PAL or NTSC systems, it can accept content with the new extended colour space (xvYCC) and expands the colour formats.
TV-set designers can custom-map colours to their display panel of choice, thus ensuring the TV delivers the best possible colour.
The VCT-Premium further improves picture quality by dealing with noise associated with digital TV.
MPEG video coding can introduce 'mosquito noise' and 'block noise' to the video signal.
The VCT-Premium eliminates this noise with advanced algorithms that reduce the digital noise effect while maintaining the picture sharpness.
"Micronas has extended its VCT platform to accommodate the worldwide trend towards Full HD 1080p", explains Thomas Hilpert, Product Marketing Manager TV, at Micronas.
"And we made sure that the VCT-Premium is future-proof".
"The new H.264 format is a great market opportunity for TV-set makers, but not all markets are adopting it at the same rate".
"Our solution allows TV-set designers to add off the shelf MPEG2/H.264 decoder chips for the respective markets, without the expense of including it in all sets".
With the adoption of Blu-ray and HD-DVD media, the industry took a big step forward -- both formats can deliver movies exactly as filmed, at 24 frames per second (frames a second).
The VCT-Premium supports this 24p mode -- showing true cinematic video quality.
And the system can even go one step further with its companion chip, the Micronas FRC 94xyM.
The FRC94xyM, the fourth-generation truD Full HD 120, smoothly increases the frame rate from 24 frames a second to as fast as 120 frames a second at Full HD resolution.
It generates new intermediate frames so that on-screen motion is smooth and free of motion-blurring and film judder.
TV manufacturers can offer a standard TV model with VCT-Premium and, by adding the FRC 94xyM, an advanced TV model, both based on one core system.
Micronas has leveraged its expertise in audio processing to equip the VCT-Premium with an extensive portfolio of audio technologies that deliver best-in-class sound.
As part of Micronas meloD audio processing technologies, the VCT-Premium features a parametric equaliser, which lets system designers match sound output to the chosen speaker system.
Micronas' night listening mode, meloD NIGHT+, reduces loud sections and enhances quiet passages to create a pleasant entertainment experience in sensitive listening environments.
Besides the QFP package with integrated DRAM, the VCT-Premium also comes in a BGA package allowing the connection to external DDR memory.
Samples of the VCT-Premium, evaluation boards, development tools and a comprehensive software package are available now.
Micronas will demonstrate the VCT-Premium in hall 1.1, stand 135 at IFA 2007 in Berlin, Germany, from August 31st - September 5th, 2007.
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