NTT Electronics, a Yokohama City, Japan-based firm, has announced that it initiated development of its “next generation” H.264/AVC encoder/decoder family of large scale integrated circuits. A 2012 product launch is expected.

“NTT Electronics is the world's first company to launch H.264/AVC encoder/decoder LSI products with 4:2:2 support for video transmission,” said Shoichi Otake, general manager of the First Product Group at NTT Electronics. “This high-quality video compression technology has gained an excellent reputation around the world for various broadcasting needs.”

NTT says that the new chipset will employ 10-bit encoding technology to reflect the broadcast industry movement from tape to digital files for content storage. The company said that it has no plans to drop 8-bit processing in its other product lines, announcing that it would continue to work on enhancing the performance of the 8-bit devices.