Magnum Semiconductor Announces DX8110 Professional H.264 SD/HD Encoder

First Member of DX1 Family Provides Visibly Superior Solutions for IPTV and Satellite Broadcasts

Apr 14, 2008

Las Vegas, Nevada, April 14, 2008 - At the National Association of Broadcasters show, Magnum Semiconductor Corporation, a worldwide leader in video compression technology, today announced the DX8110 Professional Encode solution, the first member of the company's sixth-generation DX1 family of video encoder products. The DX8110 H.264 encoder provides a scalable platform for full-featured broadcast solutions for IPTV and satellite encoder applications.

"The DX8110 raises the bar for video quality and performance among H.264 devices," said Bob Saffari, vice president of marketing for set-top and broadcast products at Magnum. "Equipment makers now have a path to continuous improvements in quality and efficiency for their state-of-the-art video compression systems," he added.

The DX1 family of chips is based on the Magnum Domino[X] media processor architecture, a flexible and scalable multi-core design for standard definition (SD) and high definition (HD) encoding. The DX8110 provides a rich set of pre-processing capabilities including motion-compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) and content-adaptive deblocking, resulting in superior noise reduction for crisper images.

Many professional encoders in the market today are derived from consumer market solutions. They often sacrifice key features that would benefit the more demanding broadcast applications. Magnum has taken the opposite approach with the DX8110, driving the most comprehensive set of high and main profile H.264 tools. A typical HD encoding solution based on the DX8110 provides up to 1 trillion operations per second (1 TeraOPS) of calculating power for motion estimation and video DSP processing, a performance level unmatched in the industry. Capable of both single- and multi-pass encoding, the Domino[X] scalable architecture enables sophisticated statistical multiplexing (statmux) and look-ahead functions to drive ever-deeper compression for significantly lower video bitrates.

"The H.264 standard is a rapidly growing part of the broadcast infrastructure. H.264 broadcast encoder shipments will grow by 70% over the next few years," observed Michelle Abraham, principal analyst at the market research firm In-Stat (www.instat.com). "The key issue driving the growth of this standard is its potential for achieving better video quality at lower bit-rates," she added.

Magnum offers a complete development package for the DX8110, including the Nova multichip reference board for a typical HD encoding solution, and the DX8110 standard software package, to assist customers in achieving time-to-market goals. Source code licensing is available for select customers.

The DX8110 is part of the DX1 encoder product family that also includes the DX8112 MPEG2 HD/SD encoder. The DX8110 is packaged in a 35x35mm 680-pin BGA package. It is available now for samples and production deliveries.

About Magnum Semiconductor

Magnum Semiconductor is a leading provider of chips, software, and platforms for consumer entertainment systems and the professional broadcast infrastructure. Magnum provides the tools and technologies for creating, delivering and enjoying video throughout the broadcast infrastructure, around the home, and on-the-go. Magnums chips and software are used in professional video encoders, broadcast transcoders, in-home set-top boxes, consumer DVD recorders, hard-disk based home media centers, digital camcorders, and a variety of in-home and portable media-centered devices. Magnum Semiconductor is headquartered in Milpitas, California, with sales and engineering offices in Canada, China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Further information is available at www.magnumsemi.com.