Horizon Semiconductors Fuels the Broadcast Market With Native 1080/60p High Definition Professional Encoder IC

Monday, January 7th, 2008

LAS VEGAS, 2008 International CES — Horizon Semiconductors, a leading provider of highly integrated silicon solutions that enable secure video and audio compression & transmission for the consumer electronics and broadcast markets, announced the immediate availability of a multi-standard native 1080/60p professional encoder IC for the Cable, Satellite, Telco, Terrestrial & Mobile triple/quad-play broadcast markets.

Horizon’s Hz2010 supports wide range of features and capabilities uniquely designed to meet the emerging requirements of the broadcast & professional encoding equipment markets. The Hz2010 incorporates a multi-standard high definition video encoder natively supporting resolutions of 1080/60p and below, and implementing leading compression standards including AVC (up to HP@L4.2), VC-1 (AP@L3 and MP@HL), MPEG-2 (MP@HL) & MPEG-4/H.263, an advanced video pre-processor featuring motion compensated spatio-temporal noise reduction filtering, motion-adaptive de-interlacer, frame rate conversion and advanced scaling, a high performance audio encoder engine enabling encoding to various audio formats such as MPEG-1, AC-3, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS, AAC and WMA, a programmable high-bandwidth transport processor, as well as a multi-standard conditional access/digital rights management security processor. Horizon’s Hz2010 is provided with a comprehensive software stack and a reference hardware platform designed to significantly accelerate OEM/ODM development cycle.

“By integrating our native 1080/60P broadcast-quality encoding technology with our key strengths in Cable, Satellite & IPTV set-top boxes as well as location-free terminals, we will be uniquely positioned to build compelling integrated solutions for both ends of the wire.” said Amir Morad, President and CEO of Horizon Semiconductors. “Our unrivalled professional broadcast-quality video/audio encoding & transcoding solutions, will allow cable, satellite and IPTV providers to securely deliver media streams from the head-end to the set-top box, using unmatched quality and bitrates, freeing space for more channels at lower cost.”

“We are happy to see Horizon’s consistent pursuit of native 1080/60p decoding, encoding & transcoding technologies and product offerings, and expect Horizon’s products to play a key role in the evolution of 1080/60p broadcast systems & professional equipment, as well as in the evolution of 1080/60p satellite, cable and IPTV, and location-free triple/quad-play set-top box solutions.”, said Michelle Abraham, principal analyst, In-Stat. “With this recent Hz2010 release, Horizon’s comprehensive product portfolio addresses both ends of the wire, enabling broadband operators worldwide to provide integrated video, voice and high-speed data services anywhere.”

Product Information

The Hz2010 is designed with the highest level of integration, embedding a variety of cutting edge technologies such as:

  • Professional multi stream encoder engine, supporting real-time encoding of 1920×1080/60p, or faster than real time lower-resolution media streams, using leading compression standards including: H.264 (AVC) Baseline, Main and High Profile up to Level 4.2, VC-1 (SMPTE 421M) Advanced Profile @ Level 3, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4.
  • Multi-channel multi-format audio encoder, and special audio effects processor, supporting leading standards such as: MPEG-1 Layer I, II & III (MP3), Dolby(R) Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, AAC/AAC-LC/AAC-HE, DTS, DTS-HD (DTS++), WMA and WMA Pro.
  • Advanced motion estimation engine for accurate motion tracing with extra wide search range (in both P and B pictures), capable of tracking fast motion in high definition content.
  • Frame, field, picture adaptive field/frame (PAFF) and macroblock adaptive field/frame (MBAFF) encoding.
  • Entire suite of AVC encoding modes, including partition and sub-partition, multiple reference pictures, hierarchical GOP, direct and direct 8×8 modes, all intra-prediction modes and weighted prediction.
  • Automatic scene change, fade-in / fade-out, repeated field detection.
  • Advanced video pre-processor, supporting temporal, spatial and non-linear adaptive noise reduction.
  • Advanced multi-pass rate control with vector based content detection and video quality optimizer, supporting high-quality CBR and VBR modes.
  • High performance full complexity rate distortion optimization co-processor capable of fully encoding and decoding of tens of encoding scenarios per macroblock, enabling selection of best encoding mode based on optimal rate-distortion trade-off.
  • High speed de-blocking in-loop filtering, CABAC and CAVLC engines.
  • Multi-stream high bandwidth flexible multiplexor processor, supporting MPEG2 transport and program formats, as well as essential web and mobile delivery file formats such as M2T, MPG, MP4, ASF, AVI, MKV, and others.
  • Wide variety of advanced connectivity and peripherals including DVB TS, 10/100/1G Ethernet, USB 2.0, IDE/ATAPI, SMPTE-292, Flash, I2C, SPI/SSI, UART and others.
  • Powerful, easy to use API, with the ability to accelerate and off-load host application code.

To facilitate faster time-to-market, Horizon is also announcing the immediate availability of the HzR2010 broadcast encoder reference design kit. This fully operational encoder box product includes PCB schematics, full software design kit and documentation.

Horizon SoC solutions and reference design platforms for Satellite, Cable, & IPTV STBs, DVRs, Home Media Centers and HD-DVD/BluRay players and recorders, will be showcased at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES-2008), in Horizon’s private suite located at Hilton’s East Tower HE1769 (attendance by invitation only).