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TAIPEI, Taiwan ? Cheaper DVD recorders may not be under the tree this Christmas, but Taiwan chip makers hope to make the consumer machines the stocking stuffer of choice by next winter.
Aiming to sharply lower the cost of DVD recorders, the island's top two optical chip makers are preparing chip sets that should make the machines more attractive to consumers by the second half of next year as greater competition and higher volumes drive IC prices down. "After that, there won't be any reason for recordables to be so expensive," said Chin Wu, president of ALi Corp., formerly known as Acer Laboratories Inc.
Currently, DVD recorders from Panasonic and Philips sell for between $600 and $1,000 at places like Circuit City. Once the Taiwanese enter the market, Wu believes that can come down to under $300 by the end of next year.
ALi will release samples of its DVD read and write processor in the first quarter, with an integrated TV encoder and compatibility with DVD+RW/-RW formats. The chip will link with its in-house analog front-end chip, for reading RF data from a laser detector and converting it to digital format, and a MPEG-2 encoder/decoder for data compression and decompression, which was developed in-house from its own intellectual property. Small-volume production of the chip set may start by the end of the second quarter.
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