NEC Electronics Announces the World’s First Single-Chip LSI for Blu-ray Disc Players

The EMMATM 3PF has the following features.

1. All of the main functions required for Blu-ray Disc players are included on one chip, including the digital conversion of analog data read from optical discs, the digital decoding of encoded images and sounds and a High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) for output to televisions.
2. The package area has been reduced by 50% due to the single-chip configuration, the integration of external memory and the internalization of peripheral functions.
3. The EMMATM 3PF supports BD-ROM Profile 2.0, the latest Blu-ray Disc specification. This profile includes picture-in-picture playback, high quality sound, and network connections for downloading additional content.
4. The EMMATM 3PF has a multi-core CPU, which delivers an industry-best 1150 DMIPS (Dhrystone MIPS), and a graphic processing accelerator.

The EMMATM 3PF allows users to create compact, high performance Blu-ray Disc players. In the future, this new product will make an important contribution to the integration of Blu-ray Disc playback into all audio-visual systems.

Monthly production is expected to be 1,000,000 units from the fourth quarter of 2008.

Since introducing EMMA, the world's first MPEG-decoder LSI for set top boxes (STB) with digital broadcast receivers in 1998, NEC Electronics' semiconductor production for digital audio-visual components has focused on product expansion and sales operations in the STB, digital television and DVD recorder fields. In 2001, NEC Electronics' semiconductor operations for PC peripherals produced the SCOMBO® LSI for optical disc drives. Since then, it has continued to make improvements such as faster writing speeds and increased format compatibility while expanding its product lineup. As a result of these efforts, SCOMBO Series sold a total of 150,000,000 units as of May 2008.

Recently, new Blu-ray Disc compatible devices have entered into the digital audio-visual and computer peripheral markets. Despite being a new market, the Blu-ray Disc player market is still expected to grow rapidly. Sales are projected to triple from 2,200,000 units in 2007 to 6,800,000 units in 2008. Blu-ray Disc players require a frontend to convert analog data read from optical disk to digital data and a backend to decode the encoded digital video and audio data and output it to televisions.

In June of this year, NEC Electronics released the SCOMBO/UM2P, which has all of the frontend functions on one chip. In the past, NEC Electronics has released products designed to place the backend functions on one chip and this month it released the EMMA3P, which specializes in playback. The EMMATM 3PF has these two advanced system LSI on one chip, which will help reduce the size of future Blu-ray Disc players.