Maximizing video quality: What is the semiconductor contribution to the DTV food chain?
June 25th, 2007By Vish Nayak, Vice President of TV and Display Electronics
Although there are more than three score TV OEM brands competing worldwide, there may be room for at most a dozen brands. This leads me to believe that the industry is heading towards a rapid industry consolidation of most brands and that few TV OEM companies will eventually survive. This has put tremendous pressure on semiconductor suppliers who are a crucial link in the value added supply chain to help the TV OEMs provide enough product and performance-related feature differentiation at a market demanded price points that will help them swim against the commoditization tide. It is a constant quest for IC companies to provide enough product differentiation, performance improvements and functional gains.
To fight this commoditization trend inherent in the consumer electronics business, TV OEMs are adopting strategies that add unique features using the latest semiconductor technology and process improvements to expand the boundaries of the state of the art in using different video/audio processing techniques.
With digital video, subtle video artifacts are created, as a result of digital video processing and scaling is required to match the resultant video resolution to the display panel’s native resolution. Current innovations in semiconductor functional improvements seek to raise the bar on video quality and address the need for deep color space improvements by using newly defined wider video color gamuts like xvYCC, by employing sophisticated ME/MC algorithms (Motion Estimation/Motion Compensation) to eliminate motion judder video artifacts and minimize motion blur in LCD TVs and by deploying higher panel refresh rates to reduce video artifacts as a result of fast moving scenes in a displayed video, using newer digital connection technologies like HDMI 1.3 and Display Port, which support much improved color gamuts.
There clearly is a need for the digital TV to be in a primal position as the key display device in any home entertainment solution. The ability to serve content in any form, at any place or from any device will make digital flat panel TV the killer application platform for the home. Sourced entertainment content platforms might include home media servers, networked storage, or a PC or some other mobile productivity, gaming and communications platform that may also host a lot of personal and shared video/audio content that is directed to the digital TV by wireless video inputs/outputs and connections that employ the latest wireless home networking technologies like UWB and Wireless USB.
Which brings us to our major question: What other semiconductor technical innovations and functional requirements will need to be implemented to minimize the impact on semiconductor vendors? What hardware/software trade-off will they have to consider in order to meet these emerging market requirements like networked FPD TVs or some other emerging scenarios cited above?
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