SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Zoran Corp. here and Japan's Sanyo Group today announced a long-term strategic partnership in DVD chip technology, and separately, the Santa Clara company said it has delivered a new integrated circuit that improves parental control over what children hear in TV programming, compared to V-Chip technology.
Zoran said it partnered with Principal Solutions to co-develop the software that enables the TV Guardian technology to filter out "adult language" and replace those words with "more appropriate" language for family viewing. The TV Guardian application runs on Zoran's Vaddis home entertainment server processor, which acts as a "convergence" backbone for manufacturers implementing television, digital camera, and other multimedia applications on DVD players.
Sanyo is building DVD players based on the Vaddis entertainment processor. The company is the first to offer this capability to consumers, said Tsuneharu Tamatani, general manager of Sanyo Technosound Co. Ltd.
Meanwhile, Sanyo Technosound and Zoran said they are collaborating on microcontroller solutions to lower the cost and improve quality in DVD players. The first single-chip MCU for DVD players is being used in Sanyo's new Vaddis-based DVD series, which began shipping in January. These products contain support for the TV Guardian system as well.
Zoran--a developer of digital chips for consumer electronics--and Sanyo plan to offer the new single-chip microcontroller to other DVD manufacturers.
For about four years, Zoran has been supplying programmable Vaddis processors to the marketplace. "It made sense for us to work together with Sanyo to deliver significantly improved DVD technology for the industry," said Michael Wood, vice president and general manager of Zoran's Home Entertainment Division. Details about the partnership and supply agreement were not released.
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