Designing a personal video recording system just became simpler with LSI Logic's DMN-8650. This highly integrated chip controls both a hard-disk drive and a recordable DVD drive, but it also handles audio, video, and picture playback functions. It lets systems concurrently record and playback on both the hard-disk and DVD drives. Consumers can then record a TV program to the hard drive while viewing a DVD or time-shift a live broadcast while copying, uninterrupted, another program to a DVD.
The chip has at its core four processors to handle control, audio, and video operations: a 150-MIPS RISC control CPU with 16 kbytes of cache and another 150-MIPS RISC; an audio DSP engine with 16 kbytes of cache; a video DSP engine with 64 kbytes of data memory and the ability to tackle 16 billion operations/s (BOPS); and a motion-estimation engine with target and window memories for MPEG2 encoding and playback that performs 29 BOPS.
Also included are a 1394 controller for DV camera or host connections, audio and video interfaces along with a 2D graphics engine, and an off-chip SDRAM controller. The storage controllers have separate buses for the hard-disk and the IDE/ATAPI recordable DVD drives.
By integrating the core digital processing for a dual-drive recorder system on a single chip, LSI Logic gives system manufacturers more capabilities for more user features—users can record and store TV programs as well as photos, MP3 files, and DV camcorder content.
The chip includes LSI's proprietary pre- and post-processing technologies, TrueView Pro and True-Scan Pro, which improve image quality on the input capture side and playback side, respectively.
The DMN-8650, the latest addition to the company's DiMeNsion family, will cost $29 in volume quantities. Samples are immediately available.
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