Techwell, Inc. a leading designer of mixed signal video semiconductor solutions for the automotive, consumer electronics and security surveillance industries, has begun demonstrating their broad line of high performance TW88xx In-Car LCD display processors at the company's 2007 CES booth #5403 located within the Mobile Electronics section in the North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Techwell has developed a number of new solutions for the In-Car LCD market to respond to the growing demand for display related applications such as navigation systems, DVD entertainment including in dash DVD players, rear-seat/head-mount displays, and back up cameras in the car. All of the TW88xx processors featured at CES 2007 have integrated timing controllers and can directly support a variety of small size LCD panels from LG.Philips, Sharp, TMD, Hitachi, AU Optronics and others. Techwell will showcase existing solutions including the TW8806 as well as new products including the TW8810 which directly supports Sharp Dual View Displays and a Mobile DVR reference design that leverages Techwell's display and surveillance technologies.
"Techwell has made a determined effort through R&D and collaborations with panel providers to develop the most integrated and feature rich LCD display processors available for in-car display applications." said Feng Kuo, Ph.D., Chief Technical Officer. He added, "We are very pleased to supply our high-performance, scalable, and low cost products to the growing in-car entertainment market."
The TW8810, introduced for the first time at CES, is capable of simultaneously displaying different content viewable from various user angles depending on where the screen is being viewed from. As a result, automotive manufacturers can use the TW8810 to support applications where the driver is viewing a navigation system and the passenger is viewing a DVD title. Similarly, automotive manufacturers can use the TW8810 to enable two passengers in the rear seat of a car to view two different movies on the same screen.
In addition to supporting Sharp Dual View Panels directly, the TW8810 has multiple input formats including composite, S-Video, YPbPr, analog RGB, 24-bit digital RGB, and 8/16/24 bit YCbCr. For composite video streams, a high quality 3D comb filter for NTSC and PAL with concurrent 3D noise reduction is integrated to reduce artifacts typically found in analog video signals. A number of proprietary image processing algorithms were implemented in the TW8810 to improve picture quality including a built-in 2D de-interlacing engine with low angle compensation, black/white stretch and color enhancement. Delivering high quality in-car multimedia, greater performance and functionality, the TW8810 also has a sophisticated Picture-in-Picture (PIP) function that includes PIP with variable sub-window size, picture-over-picture (POP) and multiple PIP. The TW8810 on-screen display (OSD) can select 256 colors from 24-bit colors (16.7 million colors) and is a graphic style OSD with a variety of functions including blinking, transparency, blending and multi-window support.
According to Telematics Research Group, shipments of navigation, entertainment and driver information systems are expected to grow from a combined 16.5 million units in 2004 to a combined 47.2 million units in 2009, representing a compound annual growth rate of 23%. In addition to being incorporated into new automobiles by manufacturers, these systems are also increasingly being purchased by consumers in the aftermarket. Techwell first introduced its integrated LCD display processor in 1999 and their newest generation products demonstrate an on-going commitment to this expanding market.
Pricing and Availability
The TW8806 is in mass production. The TW8810 will be sampling in Q1 2007 and is expected to go into mass production in the second half of 2007. The Mobile DVR reference design will be available for evaluation in Q1 2007. Please contact your local Techwell sales office, representative or mailto:[email protected] for pricing and availability.