MUMBAI: Trident Microsystems, which develops advanced digital TV technology for the consumer digital video marketplace, has announced its second-generation HiDTV Pro Digital Video Processor Family.

Tailored for the era of high-definition content, the HiDTV Pro Family has the ability to simultaneously decode two high-definition video streams and drive the most demanding high-definition video displays. The company says that the HiDTV Pro Family achieves a breakthrough in high-definition video quality by incorporating a sixth-generation, twelve-bit implementation of Trident's DCRe video processor.

Fabricated using 0.13um technology, the company claims that the HiDTV Pro Video Processor Family sets a new standard for image quality, features and total system development cost in the increasingly competitive high-definition digital TV market.

With this development Trident says that it has leap-frogged the industry in video performance, features and system design cost-reduction by providing a fully-integrated, system-on-chip (SOC) incorporating both digital decoding and video processing.

By integrating its sixth-generation DCRe video processor with dual-channel, high-definition digital decoding and high-definition display support, the HiDTV Pro family meets the demands of Trident's Tier-1 OEM customers for uncompromising video quality and aggressive system-level cost reduction.

Leveraging the mature, production-proven digital television software developed with Trident's first-generation HiDTV products, the new-generation HiDTV Pro family will offer TV OEMs the ability to rapidly develop compelling high-definition digital TV systems.

The HiDTV Pro Family features advanced MPEG2 decoding, system processing and video processing features to deliver video fidelity and system functionality. The HiDTV Pro family includes:

-- Dual, 250MHz, 32-bit, MIPS processors to handle the most demanding system and application software.
-- Dual, HD-level MPEG2 video decoding engines.
-- Up to twelve-bit display control to support sophisticated flat-panel displays.
-- Twelve-bit, dual-channel scaler to ensure crisp images regardless of the display resolution.
-- Twelve-bit, dual-channel color processor with blue-stretch, green-stretch, skin-color correction and white-balance control to offer colours previously available only in the most sophisticated internally-developed designs of consumer electronics OEMs.
-- Advanced, content-adaptive 3D noise reduction to dramatically reduce the popping and crackling that is especially prevalent on today's LCD TVs.
-- Enhanced horizontal and vertical sharpness controls
-- Full-screen, 16-bit, bit-mapped OSD powered by a high-performance 2D-graphics accelerator to enable beautiful, intuitive, windows-based user interfaces that enhance the functionality of advanced TVs.