VIDEO-CENTRICITY

If there's one thing to know about Equator Technologies, it's that this small California silicon company has video on its brain. As evidence, witness the most recent additions to its digital signal processing platform — two pieces of silicon that add more functionality to video-centric products and applications with lower power consumption.

The chips are part of a company reference platform aimed not only at the teleconferencing market, but the telematics, security and surveillance markets as well, said Ying Dillaha, product marketing director for Equator. In case anyone is missing the point, she emphasized, “Our chip was architecture to do video. It's not video and it's not Internet; it's video processing.”

The two new chips improve on previous chips by lowering power consumption and jacking up speeds to 350 and 400 MHz. At the top end, the 400 MHz BSP-15-400 chip can handle up to 40 billion operations per second while consuming only 4.215 watts of power.

“We did a couple of things to make sure it works more efficiently in a high-speed environment,” said Jan Koene, Equator's product marketing manager. First, the chips are linearly scaled from lower to higher speeds. Second, digital-to-analog converters have been reworked to accommodate higher speeds.

This emphasis on higher-speed, lower-power video processing will eventually show up in consumer devices, Dillaha said. Putting that computing power in the set-top box, she said, will allow system providers to do more with narrower pipes, including — you guessed it — all kinds of video processing.
— Jim Barthold
www.equator.com