STMicroelectronics Passes the 100 Million Mark for Set-Top Box OMEGA MPEG-2 Chips

DVD shipments add another 30 million OMEGA units in two years

STMicroelectronics, the world's number one supplier of set-top box (STB) and MPEG decoder chips*, has announced that its cumulative shipments of MPEG-2 devices to STB manufacturers have now exceeded 100 million units since the first units were produced in 1995, making it the first chip supplier to achieve this milestone figure. This latest success underlines ST's continuous leadership in enabling the creation and development of the STB market, which set new records for market ramp-up in the consumer industry, passing the 10 and 100 million unit marks faster than any previous consumer phenomena such as VCRs, PCs and audio CDs.

ST pioneered the MPEG-2 chips used in STBs when it introduced the world's first Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) processor chip in 1988 and the world's first motion estimation processor chip in 1990. Motion estimation and DCT are key parts of the MPEG technology essential to STB, DVD and similar applications that require multimedia content to be compressed prior to distribution and subsequently decompressed. This early leadership allowed ST to establish and maintain its track record of being the first chip supplier to pass every significant technology and market milestone in the STB and MPEG arenas, including the first MPEG-2 video decoder, the first MPEG-2 audio/video decoder, the first integrated MPEG Transport Stream Demultiplexer Processor, the first complete chipset for digital satellite STBs, and the first supplier to ship 10 million, 50 million and 100 million MPEG-2 video decoders.

ST's continuing leadership is exemplified by its recently introduced STi5516, the latest member of its OMEGA family, which is the de facto industry standard for MPEG decoding. Suitable for use in satellite, cable and terrestrial TV applications, the new System-on-Chip (SoC) device sets unprecedented standards in terms of performance and integration level while retaining full compatibility with earlier solutions, thereby ensuring fast, safe and cost-effective product migration.

ST's OMEGA (STi55xx) family provides the most advanced solutions for all applications that involve MPEG-2 multimedia compression technology, allowing the company to leverage its continuous leadership in the STB market into other fast-growing sectors such as DVD (Digital Versatile Disk) players.