The System on a Chip that is at the heart of latest Harmonic Electra encoder is from a three year old start up, Ambarella. This week David Price Harmonic’s VP Marketing, Europe told us at the Connected Home conference in London that already 20 customers in the satellite and telco area have bought into the new range introduced last year.
The Electra 7000 offers constant bit rate or variable bit rate H.264 video and is claimed to give a 20% compression gain over DSP-based encoders.
The corporate connection goes back to inventor Fermi Wang who co-founded Ambarella in 2004 targeting the encoder and digital video camera markets. Wang comes originally out of C-Cube, a company that was acquired by Divicom that in turn formed the basis of the Harmonic encoder range before the remnants of the company were sold off to LSI Logic. C-Cube was one of the key companies behind the original MPEG 2 work, and Wang still holds some of the core patents for this work.
Wang’s last venture was at Afara Websystems, a startup that was acquired by Sun Microsystems, and its technology is the basis of the multi-core, multi-thread CPU design being harnessed by Sun in its UltraSPARCs.
Price told us, ‘The key difference is that the SoCs used in the Electra 7000 can analyze a frame in one slice. When you use a Texas Instrument DSP, or any of the existing DSP designs, it needs to break it up into 6 or 7 slices and process each one, one at a time.
Currently the Electra 7000 can process four full resolution HD channels and simultaneously 4 low resolution SD channels for PiP, program guides or multi-channel mosaics, in real time it uses multi-pass encoding, which Harmonic markets as LookAhead encoding, so that it can encode with an understanding of what the video is about to do next.
The other encoder makers are widely understood to be looking at the Ambarella chip platform for their next generation devices.