Zoom In On High-Quality Video

Susan Colwell

Zoom Video (ZV) port standard lets a system transfer video and audio data on a PC Card directly into the VGA frame buffer, bypassing the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus and the CPU. This capability frees the system to produce higher-quality video and sound, without draining the battery.

This new technology is behind a flurry of activity from such vendors as C-Cube Microsystems, Chips & Technologies, Sony, Sigma Designs, and Toshib a. They all want to give users who need full-motion video a cheap MPEG hardware solution that provides better quality at faster rates of 30 frames per second, contr ol of audio/video synchronization, MPEG-1 (with an upgrade path to MPEG-2), encoding/decoding capabilities, extended battery life, video capture, and more.

As the driving force behind the proposal, Cirrus Logic (Fremont, CA, (510) 623-8300) offers ZV support at the system level with a VGA controller, a PC Card controller, and Video Port Manager software. With ZV-compliant controllers, vendors can implement multimedia capabilities on a motherboard without additional chips and cost.

According to Kris Narayan, Cirrus's director of marketing for portable products, about a dozen notebook vendors will incorporate these components in their systems and have them ready to go by the time you read this. He adds that if you want ZV capabilities once these notebooks come out, you just need to buy a ZV-compliant PC Card, which will cost anywhere from $60 to $250, depending on your needs (e.g., for MPEG playback, video capture, or TV tuning).

C-Cube Microsystems (Milpitas, CA, (408) 944-6300) supports ZV with its CL480PC chip. Using only 1/2 W of power, the CL480PC is a small package that fits nicely on a PC Card, motherboard, or docking station. Because of its low power and size, the chip offers vendors a low-cost MPEG-1 audio/video solution.

On the controller side, Chips & Technologies (San Jose, CA, (408) 434-0600) blends video acceleration with a high-performance graphics engine in its HiQVideo series of 64-bit controllers. This series provides full-screen video at 30 fps and includes a video-capture port, support for multiple video windows, and scalable video, which lets you expand your video window to any size while maintaining the 30-fps video rate. Toshiba (Irvine, CA, (714) 583-3000) will implement the HiQVideo series in its notebooks, which the company says will be available by midyear.

Wi th all this new technology and vendors working together to give you the best possible ZV solution, on-the-go professionals can't help but see a vast improvement in the quality of their presentations. Cirrus's Narayan expects that about 40 percent of the people who buy notebooks this year will view the ZV port as a must-have feature. This should increase to 60 percent in 1997.

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Zoom Video Port Data Flow

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The path that the video and audio data on the PC Card takes using Zoom Video technology. (Source: Chips & Technologies.)