SAN JOSE, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — iGS Technologies (iGST), a leading supplier of streaming media gateway chips for Internet appliances, advanced set-top boxes (STBs) and digital TV, today announced plans to offer enhanced Linux support for its CyberPro family of streaming media gateway chips.

The addition of Linux support will enable OEMs who are developing next-generation, Internet-enabled, Linux-based set-top boxes to offer broadcast quality video and take advantage of advanced features such as transparency, PIP, and blending of video, audio, text, graphics, and animation.

“We have high expectations for Linux as a platform for next-generation set-top boxes, and some of our OEMs are already shipping Linux STBs,” said Mike Raghavan, vice president of marketing at iGST. “Our strategy is to provide a set of upgradeable software modules that enables designers of Linux-based set-top boxes to have full access to audio, broadcast video and advanced visual effects like transparency, and animation, even before the interfaces for these features have been incorporated into Linux.”

“We see growing customer demand for a Linux-based set-top box platform incorporating iGST's CyberPro 5050 streaming media controller with Sigma Designs' REALmagic EM8400 MPEG-2 decoder silicon,” stated William K. Wong, Sigma's vice president of marketing. “iGST's timely support of Linux was critical to completing this set-top box design platform.”

“Rebel.com has been using iGST video products in its Linux-based, StrongARM processor-based NetWinder product line,” said Rodney McInnis, director of product development for Rebel.com. “The iGST chips selected for our current Rebel.com StrongARM products provide rich functionality and the right level of power consumption to allow us to provide high performance in a low power consumption Internet appliance.”

iGST's CyberPro product family provides full support for features like 2D and 3D animation, graphics and RGB output, which have already been defined for Linux. In addition, iGST is developing a set of custom software modules that will enable Linux-based STBs to leverage features like audio, video, 3D animation, graphics and alpha blending, for which standard Linux interfaces have not yet been defined. The CyberPro family also provides full support for the Xfree86 Linux interface, which defines a standard protocol for communicating with x86 processors.

The CyberPro product family is the world's highest performance, most highly integrated family of streaming media gateway processors. Utilized in advanced set-top boxes, information appliances and digital TVs from the world's leading OEM manufacturers, CyberPro products combine graphics accelerators (2D and 3D versions), a fully-programmable NTSC/PAL TV encoder, a video processor that provides integrated scaling, de-interlacing and time-based correction, and an audio processor.

CyberPro streaming media gateway processors provide a number of features that enhance video quality and lay the foundation for advanced set-top box features. Among these are: eView, which enhances performance and facilitates broadcast-quality video output by enabling acquired images to be output directly to the screen; mView, which provides a hardware magnified view of Internet Web pages on the TV; and tView, the industry's most advanced and flexible transparency processing technique for blending multiple streams (i.e., video, audio, TV, Internet, EPG, and menus.)

Other key features of the CyberPro 5000/5300 family include:

• A FlexiBus interface to most major embedded CPUs, including the x86, MIPS, SH, PowerPC, and StrongARM.
  
• Two video ports for mixing analog TV with digital TV or PIP.
  
• Support for multiple, independently scalable video windows.
  
• Macrovision copy protection.

iGS Technologies Inc. is the leading supplier of high performance highly-integrated streaming media component solutions for Broadband and Internet set-top boxes and Digital TV. iGST has developed strategic alliances with leading CPU and RTOS companies and has major blue chip OEM designs worldwide in these markets.

 
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