C-Cube

Last updated
C-Cube Microsystems, Inc.
Company typePublic company
Nasdaq:  CUBE
Industry Semiconductors
FoundedAugust 8, 1988 as a California corporation
FateAcquired by LSI Logic in March 2001
Headquarters Milpitas, California
Key people
Edmund Sun, co-founder
Alex Balkanski, co-founder
Bill O'Meara, CEO
Don Valentine, Chairman
ProductsVideo compression semiconductors and subsystems

C-Cube Microsystems, Inc., was an early company in video compression technology as well as the implementation of that technology into semiconductor integrated circuits and systems. C-Cube was the first company to deliver on the market opportunity presented by the conversion of image and video data from analog to digital formats enabling markets such as VideoCD, DVD, DirecTV, digital cable, and non-linear editing systems.

Contents

History

C-Cube was founded on August 8, 1988 by Edmund Sun from Weitek and Alexandre Balkanski. Early funding came from VC firms Hambrecht & Quist and JAFCO America Ventures as well as Japanese farm equipment manufacturer Kubota Ltd. [1] [2]

Image and video technology was just beginning to make the transition from analog (VHS, Betamax, etc.) to new digital-base formats. The key issue was the amount of bandwidth required to transmit or store the digital content. Digital video compression was a key enabling technology that made digital video practical. C-Cube engineers drove the early standards for digital compression, including Eric Hamilton, chair of the JPEG committee, [3] :87 and Didier LeGall, chair of the MPEG video committee. As a result of their familiarity of the standardization process and the standards themselves, C-Cube was able to gain advantageous knowledge in the implementation of the algorithms into high-performance silicon.

Early on, the company was recognized for technical leadership but was largely unable to turn leadership into revenues and profits. The company found focus with the hiring of Bill O'Meara as CEO in 1991. He hired a new professional management staff and procured $10 million in added investment from Sequoia Capital, Texas Instruments, and AMD in late 1992 and enabled the company to drive toward profitability based on the development of products including the CL550 JPEG codec, the CL950 MPEG II (prototype) decoder, and the CL450 MPEG I decoder.

These early-to-market devices proved the concept of digital video compression to a number of large OEM customers and led to the development of next-generation industry-enabling products including the CL4000 MPEG II encoder family that enabled the DirecTV program from Hughes and the CL480 MPEG I decoder that drove the VideoCD market in Japan and China in the mid 1990s.

C-Cube went public on the NASDAQ exchange under the symbol CUBE in 1994. Its board of directors included chairman Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital, T. J. Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductor, and Gregorio Reyes of Sandisk. O'Meara retired in 1995, turning over the office to founder Alex Balkanski. Balkanski was responsible for incubating video compression equipment company DiviCom starting in 1993 and C-Cube eventually acquired them in 1996. [4] After this acquisition, the company changed its focus from strictly semiconductors to being both a chip and system supplier. Other acquisitions bolstered PC driver software and reference design expertise including the purchase of the software driver unit of Ring Zero as well as Media Computer Technologies (MCT) in 1995. [5] Umesh Padval was brought in to run C-Cube Semiconductor in 1998.

During the late 1990s, C-Cube was unable to repeat its runaway hits seen earlier in the decade. The company sold its DiviCom division to Harmonic Lightwaves in May, 2000 for nearly $1.7 billion. C-Cube Semiconductor (Nasdaq CUBED) was eventually sold to competitor LSI Logic in March 2001 in a stock transaction worth $878 million. [6] LSI sold off the consumer products business (including what was C-Cube) to Magnum Semiconductor in 2007. [7] [8]

Products

C-Cube ZiVA-PC video decoder Quadrant CineMaster 3 - C-Cube ZiVA-PC.jpg
C-Cube ZiVA-PC video decoder
Die of C-Cube CL550 C-Cube CL550 die.JPG
Die of C-Cube CL550
Die of C-Cube CL950 C-Cube CL950 die.JPG
Die of C-Cube CL950
Die of C-Cube CL4000 C-Cube CL4000 die.JPG
Die of C-Cube CL4000
ProductYearFeatures
CL550 JPEG codec 1990
  • World's first 'real-time' JPEG codec
  • Used in digital cameras, color printers and scanners and video editing systems
  • Sold as a component for integration into independent products; also available integrated in a $4,000 expansion card for PC/AT-based systems or a $3,000 card for Macintosh systems [9]
  • Available in the Compression Master expansion card for PC and Mac systems priced at $995 [10] :150
CL950 MPEG-1 video decoder1991
  • World's first single-chip MPEG-1 video decoder
  • Capable of decoding full-screen (720×480) real time (30 frame/s) images
  • First C-Cube chip driven by programmable microcode
  • Used primarily as a demonstration vehicle, never entered full production
CL450 MPEG-1 video decoder1992
  • World's first production MPEG-1 video decoder
  • Developed in conjunction with Philips for their CD-i platform
  • CL450i microcode variant
  • Used for early VideoCD development in Japan
CL4000 MPEG-1 encoder1993
  • World's first real-time MPEG-1 video encoder chipset
  • Contained 1.2M transistors per chip
  • Up to eight chips were used for 'full screen' (720×480) resolution
  • Enabled the launch of the DirecTV program by RCA/Thomson
  • Enabled the development of mass content for VideoCDs and digital karaoke in the Far East
CL9100 MPEG-2 decoder1994
  • Real-time MPEG-2 decoder chip
  • Decoded MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (simple and main profile), and General Instrument's proprietary Digicypher II
  • Enabled high-volume cable and satellite decoder boxes worldwide
CLM4400 (VideoRISC) MPEG-2 encoder1994
  • World's first real-time MPEG-2 encoder chipset
  • First device based on VideoRISC architecture [11]
  • Enabled deployments of cable, satellite and content authoring for the upcoming DVD market.
  • CLM4200 codec variant for video conferencing, designed with PictureTel
  • CLM4440 variant for multimedia authoring
  • CLM4550 MPEG-1 variant for real-time communications and authoring for games and entertainment
  • CLM4720 storage encoder to format video for video file servers and broadcast automation applications
CL480 MPEG-1 decoder1994
  • High-volume, low cost MPEG-1 decoder for the VideoCD market
  • Co-developed with JVC and Philips
  • Enabled a huge upsurge for the VideoCD platform in Japan, Korea and China
  • Microcode variant, the CL480PC enabled large-scale deployment of digital video on the PC
CLM4111 MPEG-1 encoder1997
  • A low-cost encoder for desktop video creation and editing at the price level of a "quality graphics card" [12]
  • Incorporated into digital video creation peripherals such as those from Dazzle Multimedia [13]
DVx single chip MPEG-2 codec1997
  • First single chip MPEG-2 codec
  • Followed up by DVxpress in 1998 for digital video production

Related Research Articles

In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression reduces bits by identifying and eliminating statistical redundancy. No information is lost in lossless compression. Lossy compression reduces bits by removing unnecessary or less important information. Typically, a device that performs data compression is referred to as an encoder, and one that performs the reversal of the process (decompression) as a decoder.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JPEG</span> Lossy compression method for reducing the size of digital images

JPEG is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality. Since its introduction in 1992, JPEG has been the most widely used image compression standard in the world, and the most widely used digital image format, with several billion JPEG images produced every day as of 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lossy compression</span> Data compression approach that reduces data size while discarding or changing some of it

In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size for storing, handling, and transmitting content. The different versions of the photo of the cat on this page show how higher degrees of approximation create coarser images as more details are removed. This is opposed to lossless data compression which does not degrade the data. The amount of data reduction possible using lossy compression is much higher than using lossless techniques.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Video codec</span> Digital video processing

A video codec is software or hardware that compresses and decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, codec is a portmanteau of encoder and decoder, while a device that only compresses is typically called an encoder, and one that only decompresses is a decoder.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JPEG 2000</span> Image compression standard and coding system

JPEG 2000 (JP2) is an image compression standard and coding system. It was developed from 1997 to 2000 by a Joint Photographic Experts Group committee chaired by Touradj Ebrahimi, with the intention of superseding their original JPEG standard, which is based on a discrete cosine transform (DCT), with a newly designed, wavelet-based method. The standardized filename extension is .jp2 for ISO/IEC 15444-1 conforming files and .jpx for the extended part-2 specifications, published as ISO/IEC 15444-2. The registered MIME types are defined in RFC 3745. For ISO/IEC 15444-1 it is image/jp2.

The JPEG File Interchange Format (JFIF) is an image file format standard published as ITU-T Recommendation T.871 and ISO/IEC 10918-5. It defines supplementary specifications for the container format that contains the image data encoded with the JPEG algorithm. The base specifications for a JPEG container format are defined in Annex B of the JPEG standard, known as JPEG Interchange Format (JIF). JFIF builds over JIF to solve some of JIF's limitations, including unnecessary complexity, component sample registration, resolution, aspect ratio, and color space. Because JFIF is not the original JPG standard, one might expect another MIME type. However, it is still registered as "image/jpeg".

Motion JPEG is a video compression format in which each video frame or interlaced field of a digital video sequence is compressed separately as a JPEG image.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Compression artifact</span> Distortion of media caused by lossy data compression

A compression artifact is a noticeable distortion of media caused by the application of lossy compression. Lossy data compression involves discarding some of the media's data so that it becomes small enough to be stored within the desired disk space or transmitted (streamed) within the available bandwidth. If the compressor cannot store enough data in the compressed version, the result is a loss of quality, or introduction of artifacts. The compression algorithm may not be intelligent enough to discriminate between distortions of little subjective importance and those objectionable to the user.

MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual is a video compression format developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It uses block-wise motion compensation and a discrete cosine transform (DCT), similar to previous standards such as MPEG-1 Part 2 and H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2.

Zoran Corporation was a multinational digital technology company, founded in 1981 and headquartered in Silicon Valley, that was predominantly focused on designing and selling SoC integrated circuits for consumer electronics applications. The name Zoran is derived from the Hebrew word for silicon. Zoran was incorporated in the state of Delaware and had offices in Canada, China, England, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the US. Zoran had strong ties with Israel, with a strong R&D presence and being the beneficiary of incentives from organizations such as Israel's Ministry of Industry and Trade.

Alchemy is a family of ultra low power embedded microprocessors originally designed by Alchemy Semiconductor for communication and media devices. Alchemy processors are SoCs integrating a CPU core, a memory controller, and a varying set of peripherals. All members of the family use the Au1 CPU core implementing the MIPS32 instruction set by MIPS Technologies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">R3000</span> RISC microprocessor

The R3000 is a 32-bit RISC microprocessor chipset developed by MIPS Computer Systems that implemented the MIPS I instruction set architecture (ISA). Introduced in June 1988, it was the second MIPS implementation, succeeding the R2000 as the flagship MIPS microprocessor. It operated at 20, 25 and 33.33 MHz.

JPEG XR is an image compression standard for continuous tone photographic images, based on the HD Photo specifications that Microsoft originally developed and patented. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, and is the preferred image format for Ecma-388 Open XML Paper Specification documents.

The following is a list of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC products and implementations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Magnum Semiconductor</span>

Magnum Semiconductor Inc. was a video compression technology company headquartered in Milpitas, California, and with an engineering branch at Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. It traded under the Magnum Semiconductor name between its foundation in 2003, and its 2016 acquisition by GigOptix, when the combined company was rebranded as GigPeak.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LSI Corporation</span> American company

LSI Logic Corporation, was an American company founded in Santa Clara, California, was a pioneer in the ASIC and EDA industries. It evolved over time to design and sell semiconductors and software that accelerated storage and networking in data centers, mobile networks and client computing.

A video coding format is a content representation format of digital video content, such as in a data file or bitstream. It typically uses a standardized video compression algorithm, most commonly based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) coding and motion compensation. A specific software, firmware, or hardware implementation capable of compression or decompression in a specific video coding format is called a video codec.

Harmonic Inc. is an American technology company that develops and markets video routing, server, and storage products for companies that produce, process, and distribute video content for television and the Internet.

JPEG XS is an interoperable, visually lossless, low-latency and lightweight image and video coding system used in professional applications. Applications of the standard include streaming high-quality content for virtual reality, drones, autonomous vehicles using cameras, gaming, and broadcasting. It was the first ISO codec ever designed for this specific purpose. JPEG XS, built on core technology from both intoPIX and Fraunhofer IIS, is formally standardized as ISO/IEC 21122 by the Joint Photographic Experts Group with the first edition published in 2019. Although not official, the XS acronym was chosen to highlight the eXtra Small and eXtra Speed characteristics of the codec. Today, the JPEG committee is still actively working on further improvements to XS, with the second edition scheduled for publication and initial efforts being launched towards a third edition.

References

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  6. Technology Briefing: Deals; Lsi Logic To Buy C-Cube Microsystems - New York Times
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