Products

TFT LCD Controller for LCD Monitors

Monitor displays are getting sharper and wider as well as thinner, lighter and flatter. All of these advancements are due to intense research and development in the production of affordable flat-panel color displays. Market data show that the TFT LCD monitor is becoming a serious threat to the traditional CRT monitor in the desktop monitor market. The annual volume of the desktop monitor market is predicted to reach 100 million units by the year 2000, and some market survey data show that 10 to 20 percent of the desktop monitors will be LCD monitors by year 2000. With the price of LCD panels falling quite rapidly, LCD monitors have become much more appealing to the end customers because of their much smaller form factor. Market experts have observed that the price for the 12.1-inch SVGA LCD monitors are slipping to the $400 to $500 level, and the price for the 15-inch XGA LCDs could soon come down to the $700 to $800 range.

With these market trends in mind, SmartASIC is developing a product line specifically for analog-interface TFT LCD monitors. The advantage of an analog-interface LCD monitor is that its interface is fully compatible with the interface of a desktop CRT monitor. This makes the analog-interface TFT LCD a true "plug-and-play" component. The controllers in this product line cover a wide product spectrum from the low-cost VGA and SVGA monitors, to mid-range XGA monitors, and all the way to the high-end SXGA monitors.

SmartASIC is also developing controllers compatible with industry standard for digital-interface TFT LCD monitors. The digital-interface monitor is a lower cost solution than the analog-interface monitor, but it requires a special graphic card and a new cable and connector from the computer graphics adapter to the monitor. This solution will be ideal for computer systems bundled together with a LCD monitor.

TV Video Processors for Digital TV

TVs and PCs are rapidly converging to create a new class of entertainment products called PC/TV system or home theater. These new products combine the best features of a PC and a TV in an environment that is as easy to use as a standard TV and as flexible and powerful as a desktop computer. In many countries, digital TV broadcasts that bring high-quality video to every hoursehold are about to start. This is creating a new demand for displays that feature bigger, crisper and sharper pictures with resolutions of 800x600, 1024x768 or higher. The new displays may be used as digital TVs to watch new HDTV programs and conventional TV programs. They also can be used as computer monitors. Inside of each these new displays, a dedicated video processor must convert the conventional analog TV video to digital video, and to merge that with the digital video received directly from HDTV broadcast, satellites and/or digital cable.

SmartASIC is developing a family of TV video processors to process the traditional TV video for viewing on digital displays. The video processor is able to handle various formats of traditional TV video, such as NTSC and PAL, and it also can accept the digital video like RGB/YUV as input. The video processor implements several proprietary video processing technologies to improve video quality, including input mode detection, cross-talk reduction, noise filtering, bandwidth expansion, de-interlacing, anti-flickering, line-doubling, image scaling, frame rate conversion and many other image enhancement features.

SD2000

STV110 New