ANGA Cable 2007: Fujitsu Enhances HD Chip

Fujitsu Microelectronics America last week showed off its next-gen integrated video processing single-chip that supports the H.264 format. The chip made its bow at the ANGA Cable 2007 show in Cologne, Germany.

The chip (MB86H51) can compress and decompress HD video (1920x1080) in real time using the H.264 format. Fujitsu said it's the industry's first single-chip device for "full HD H.264 high profile Version 4.0 video processing that incorporates embedded memory." The MB86H51 also compresses/decompresses audio in real time via formats such as MPEG-1 Audio Layer, according to Fujitsu.

The MB86H51 is an enhanced version of the Fujitsu MB86H50 for HD (1440x1080), which was unveiled at CES2007 in January.

The device taps into high-compression technology (devised at Fujitsu Labs) to reduce processing requirements, whereby a proprietary algorithm automatically decreases compression to areas in an image where artifacts are most noticeable to the human eye. Likewise, it increases compression to other image areas. Thus, the company concludes, such a feature also makes it possible to reduce image sizes by a half to a third of the MPEG-2 format while maintaining image quality.

The chip contains two blocks of embedded 256 MB memory (FCRAM) and is about 15mm square.