Horizon Semiconductors, announced the immediate availability of a multi-standard native 1080/60p professional encoder IC for the Cable, Satellite, Telco, Terrestrial & Mobile triple/quad-play broadcast markets. To facilitate faster time-to-market, Horizon is also announcing the immediate availability of the HzR2010 broadcast encoder reference design kit. This fully operational encoder box product includes PCB schematics, full software design kit and documentation.

    Horizon's Hz2010 supports wide range of features and capabilities uniquely designed to meet the emerging requirements of the broadcast & professional encoding equipment markets. Horizon's Hz2010 is provided with a comprehensive software stack and a reference hardware platform designed to significantly accelerate OEM/ODM development cycle.

    Amir Morad, President and CEO of Horizon Semiconductors stated: "By integrating our native 1080/60P broadcast-quality encoding technology with our key strengths in Cable, Satellite & IPTV set-top boxes as well as location-free terminals, we will be uniquely positioned to build compelling integrated solutions for both ends of the wire. Our unrivalled professional broadcast-quality video/audio encoding & transcoding solutions, will allow cable, satellite and IPTV providers to securely deliver media streams from the head-end to the set-top box, using unmatched quality and bitrates, freeing space for more channels at lower cost."

    The Hz2010 incorporates a multi-standard high definition video encoder natively supporting resolutions of 1080/60p and below, and implementing leading compression standards including AVC, VC-1, MPEG-2 & MPEG-4/H.263 and an advanced video pre-processor featuring motion compensated spatio-temporal noise reduction filtering. There is also motion-adaptive de-interlacer, frame rate conversion and advanced scaling, a high performance audio encoder engine enabling encoding to various audio formats such as MPEG-1, AC-3, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS, AAC and WMA, a programmable high-bandwidth transport processor, as well as a multi-standard conditional access/digital rights management security processor.

    Horizon designs, develops & supplies complete system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions and related hardware & software applications. Horizon product portfolio includes solutions for digital cable, satellite and IPTV set-top-boxes, DTV, DVD, HD-DVD & BluRay players and recorders, Digital Video Recorders and Home Media Centers.

Among the futures:
    - Frame, field, picture adaptive field/frame (PAFF) and macroblock adaptive field/frame (MBAFF) encoding.
    - Multi-channel multi-format audio encoder, and special audio effects processor, supporting leading standards such as: MPEG-1 Layer I, II & III (MP3), Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, AAC/AAC-LC/AAC-HE, DTS, DTS-HD (DTS++), WMA and WMA Pro.
    - High speed de-blocking in-loop filtering, CABAC and CAVLC engines.
    - Advanced motion estimation engine for accurate motion tracing with extra wide search range (in both P and B pictures), capable of tracking fast motion in high definition content.
    - Entire suite of AVC encoding modes, including partition and sub-partition, multiple reference pictures, hierarchical GOP, direct and direct 8x8 modes, all intra-prediction modes and weighted prediction.
    - Automatic scene change, fade-in / fade-out, repeated field detection.
    - Powerful, easy to use API, with the ability to accelerate and off-load host application code.
    - Advanced video pre-processor, supporting temporal, spatial and non-linear adaptive noise reduction.
    - Advanced multi-pass rate control with vector based content detection and video quality optimizer, supporting high-quality CBR and VBR modes.
    - Wide variety of advanced connectivity and peripherals including DVB TS, 10/100/1G Ethernet, USB 2.0, IDE/ATAPI, SMPTE-292, Flash, I2C, SPI/SSI, UART and others.

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