Wave Issue 0106 2/2/01 Article 1-02

***Toshiba Announces MPEG4 Videophone Chip
(February 1)

According to Network World, Toshiba announced the development of
a chip that holds the promise of bringing video capabilities to
cellular telephones. The device, which is expected to be
available in mass quantities from the fourth quarter of this
year, combines almost everything necessary to receive and decode
a digital video stream encoded in the MPEG-4 standard, the
company said in a statement. The chip also includes an encoder,
which means it is capable of creating an MPEG-4 stream from a
video image, thus making it suitable for two-way
videoconferencing.

An improvement on an earlier device announced in February 2000,
the chip has an onboard MPEG-4 video encoder and decoder, a
speech encoder and decoder, an audio and video multiplexer and
12M bytes of dynamic random-access memory. All of this adds up to
support for Quarter Common Interface Format images (144 by 176
pixels) at 15 frames per second. Devices such as this chip are
expected to play a major part in future cellular telephones.

Third-generation mobile networks, the first of which is expected
to be launched by NTT DoCoMo in Tokyo in late May, have
sufficient capacity to support two-way video communication,
although the network is only one side of the infrastructure. To
realize such services, the telephones must also be able to
support videoconferencing, and chips such as the Toshiba device
enable them to do that.

Aiming at cellular telephones, Toshiba produced the chip using
0.18-micron production and a fine ball grid array package that
has reduced the size to 11 millimeters square. The inclusion of
multiple components on a single chip also helps reduce power
consumption.

News of the chip comes less than a month after the Japanese
company announced a companion MPEG-4 decoder chip, the TC35274XB.
That product is designed to be used in devices that receive video
streams and will go on sale sometime during the first quarter

www.toshiba.co.jp/