Chip makers are looking to add the Chinese digital TV standard AVS in case the Chinese government tries to undercut existing royalty rates, says a leading supplier of video decoding technology.
"They could make the royalties much lower than H.264, it's a possibility," said Tony King-Smith, v-p of marketing at Imagination Technologies and former director of Panasonic's UK chip design lab.
"No one really knows yet but given the fact that there is a huge base you can build from in China, that's a possibility. The Chinese have demonstrated they understand the market to an impressive degree and it will be interesting to see what happens and that's why multiple standards are so important," said King-Smith.
Imagination Technologies demonstrated a video decoder core at the Consumer Electronics Show in the US that can handle up to two full 1080p high definition streams at just 50mW per stream in a 90nm process, and there are customers working on 65nm and 45nm designs, said King-Smith. The key is that the block can reconfigure frame by frame to handle other standards such as DivX, AVS or MPEG2.
"It's for people building set-top boxes for the global markets, particularly for IPTV in China because that's where the huge volume for set top boxes will be," said King-Smith. "A lot of our US and European customers are targeting the Chinese market."
But any digital TV chip for global markets would still have to pay license fees for the H.264 video decoding standard to patent holders administrated by the MPEG-LA organisation, so China undercutting the royalty rates may not make a difference. "Historically that doesn't work terribly well but we will see," he said. However, it could be used in a multi-standard chip for a Chinese market that only runs AVS to avoid H.264 licensing fees.
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