Magnum Semiconductor Announces New Advanced DVD Codecs

MS9300 and MS9400 Chips Bring High Quality Video, Advanced Features, and Leading-Edge Copy Protection To DVD Recorder Marketplace

January 5, 2006

2006 INTERNATIONAL CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW-LAS VEGAS, Jan. 5 2006 -- Magnum Semiconductor announced today its new Advanced DVD Codec line of chip products, the MS9300 and MS9400 for DVD Recorders and Combination Recorders with Hard Disk Drives (HDD.) The new chip products incorporate high-frequency 108MHz video DACs and Diagonally Enhanced Picture Formatting (DEPF) for improved visual quality, advanced features such as direct Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial (DVB-T) digital TV (DTV) tuner support, unified dual data rate (DDR) memory support and the new Video Content Protection System (VCPS) copy protection scheme that is required in the U.S., Europe and other countries in 2006.

“Magnum’s new Advanced DVD codecs will set a new standard in the industry for video performance,” said Dr. Jack Guedj, CEO of Magnum Semiconductor. “With these new products, Magnum will support the growing “SuperMulti” formats (including +R/RW, -R/RW and RAM) as well as comply with new copy protection schemes. The SuperMulti format support will enable consumers to record and playback without worrying about media type and recording format compatibility.”

The MS9300 Series is tailored specifically for optical DVD recorders, which can have analog and digital tuners and support “SuperMulti” disk formats.

The MS9400 series is targeted for DVD recorders that also include a Hard Disk Drive (HDD). Magnum’s platform supports very large HDDs with capacity up to 400GB of storage, which can hold more than 200 hours of video content. Video content can be transferred to optical disk at speeds faster than real-time, so that consumers can conveniently make archival copies of recorded material with a few button pushes. The MS9400 also supports compression format and data rate transcoding.

The two chip lines share the new capabilities of video performance such as motion adaptive DEPF, advanced picture scaling and 108MHz video output, as well as transport stream support for digital broadcast tuners. Video and audio content in many different formats can be played, including the exciting new DiVX Ultra.

The new chips also share the same software tree support and pinouts, so that customers can design one overall circuit board and use it in a full line of products for different segments of the market. This can be done by applying software changes from Magnum’s extensive library of applications, which provides a consistent programming environment and Graphical User Interface.

Samples for the new chip products are available immediately, with mass production scheduled for the second quarter of 2006. In a related announcement today, Magnum Semiconductor’s new DVD recording chips families, the MS9300 and MS9400 are supported by the Magnum U-Romulator and GUI Simulator, for fast deployment of new OEM products. Demonstrations of these new technologies are being shown at the ShowStoppers press event at 2006 International CES on Thursday, Jan. 5 from 6:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. at the Wynn Las Vegas hotel.

About Magnum Semiconductor

Magnum Semiconductor is a premier provider of chips, software, reference platforms and engineering support services for recording, viewing and managing highquality audio/video content. Magnum Semiconductor is headquartered in Milpitas, Calif. with sales and engineering offices in Canada, China, India, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Further information is available at www.magnumsemi.com.

back to news