SEATTLE — Equator Technologies Inc., a media-processor startup, has identified Hitachi, Canon and SNK, a Japanese arcade-game developer, as its corporate partners. Equator named its partners at its formal introduction here on Wednesday.

Equator is a fabless semiconductor company designing a family of VLIW (very long instruction-word) processors for a wide range of digital consumer products. The first targets digital TV, set-top boxes and 3-D interactive games.

The startup comes with deep roots and experience in the VLIW architecture. Equator was co-founded by John Setel O'Donnell, who in the mid-1980s was a co-founder and chief architect at Multiflow Computer Inc., the defunct supercomputer company that pioneered its own VLIW processors.

Equator, which began business in 1990 as a consulting firm for supercomputer companies such as Fujitsu and NEC, was restarted in 1996 as a fabless chip company with a focus on the digital consumer market.

Working closely with its corporate partners to develop applications for its VLIW processor, Equator today is finalizing its silicon structure by simulating algorithm-processor interactions.

The startup doesn't yet have working silicon, and doesn't expect to ship its chip in volume until the fourth quarter of 1999. But O'Donnell, Equator's president, promised that the development system — including silicon, board and software — will be in its partners' hands before the end of this year. O'Donnell also stressed that Equator will be making tools available to let OEMs code software for its VLIW processor completely in C, not a combination of C and assembly language. "Our goal is to allow consumer companies to develop their own software for this highly parallel processor, with the lowest possible software development pain."

Furthermore, Equator has set one hefty goal as its corporate mission: "to replace today's consumer-electronics systems by a unified programmable platform," according to the Equator president.

In O'Donnell's view, many newly emerging consumer products consist of "a light RISC-type microprocessor and a collection of ASICs." That model is fine "as long as the DTV system defined by the Advanced Television Systems Committee lasts for the next 30 years," he said. But in a world driven by the Internet, with a new multimedia framework like MPEG-4 on the horizon, nothing is fixed. Newer and better codecs are showing up constantly, he said.

"There is a huge misfit between what the current ASIC-based hardware could offer consumer-electronics vendors and where the world is going," said O'Donnell. "Our mission is to provide consumer-electronics companies with an architecture that can span camcorders to HDTV."

To achieve that goal, the company will eventually need to launch a family of specialized VLIW processors, instead of a single processor that fits all. Still, said O'Donnell, "system designers can develop a wide range of digital systems that can run on the same C code."

Because the company's VLIW processor architecture is closely tied to applications, the close collaboration with its corporate partners is essential. Among those partners, Hitachi has been involved with Equator on three fronts: joint development of VLIW processor architecture; porting Hitachi-developed DTV All Format Decoding (AFD) software for the processor; and serving as a fab for the device.

The relationship dates back to 1994, when Hitachi's Information Systems Development Lab in Yokohama, Japan, started a joint project with Equator to develop the startup's VLIW architecture. "Hitachi shares some IPs [intellectual property] in this," noted O'Donnell.

Meanwhile, software-based AFD algorithm, developed by Hitachi America's Research and Development Division (Princeton, N.J.), will become one of the key software applications running on the Equator processor. In fact, the AFD algorithm could turn the VLIW processor into a very flexible DTV platform for consumer-electronics system vendors, the companies said.

Equator is the second company to announce the use of AFD on its DTV silicon solution. The other is Intel Corp., which is porting AFD to its Pentium, with a goal to make PCs capable of decoding all 18 formats of the U.S. digital TV standard without adding a special MPEG-2 Main Profile @ High Level processor.

The algorithm is "designed to scale in computational power with the number of pixels," explained Jack Fuhrer, senior director of Hitachi America's Digital Media Systems Laboratory. Several system vendors and chip manufacturers in the industry have developed clever down-converting technologies designed "to reduce memory" in decoding DTV streams, said Fuhrer, "but I've never seen technologies that let you reduce both memory and compute power in DTV decoding like we do in our All Format Decoder."

As for Equator's other partners, Canon is working on a 3-D graphics/imaging product based on Equator's VLIW processor and SNK (Osaka) is designing its next-generation arcade game around it, according to O'Donnell.

Together with its key corporate customers, Equator is developing software applications including modem, MPEG encode/decode, video image processing, videophone codec and 3-D renderer.

The startup has 135 employees, in addition to 25 people from Hitachi working on-site in the United States. Equator today operates in five locations: software development in Seattle; systems development in Austin, Texas; communications in Irvine, Calif.; VLIW development in Campbell, Calif.; and support in Tokyo.

Equator has major Asian venture companies as its investors, including JAFCO, China Development Corp. and Investar Capital, as well as Japan's Ado Electric and CSK Ventures, which are both subsidiaries of Sega.