Company type | Public company |
---|---|
Nasdaq: CUBE | |
Industry | Semiconductors |
Founded | August 8, 1988 as a California corporation |
Fate | Acquired 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 |
Products | Video 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.
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]
Product | Year | Features |
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CL550 JPEG codec | 1990 |
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CL950 MPEG-1 video decoder | 1991 |
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CL450 MPEG-1 video decoder | 1992 |
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CL4000 MPEG-1 encoder | 1993 |
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CL9100 MPEG-2 decoder | 1994 |
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CLM4400 (VideoRISC) MPEG-2 encoder | 1994 |
|
CL480 MPEG-1 decoder | 1994 | |
CLM4111 MPEG-1 encoder | 1997 |
|
DVx single chip MPEG-2 codec | 1997 |
|
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.
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.
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.
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.
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