Zoran Announces High Performance SupraTV SOC For Set Top Box and Digital Television Markets

SupraTV 150 And Reference Design For Terrestrial, Satellite, And Cable Applications To Be Demonstrated At IBC 2003 Amsterdam

Santa Clara, Calif. - September 10, 2003 - Zoran Corporation (Nasdaq: ZRAN) announced that the SupraTV 150, the newest member of Zoran's family of highly integrated processors for digital televisions and set top box systems, is shipping in sample quantities to customers and will be demonstrated at the International Broadcast Convention (IBC) 2003 in Amsterdam beginning September 12.

The SupraTV family of programmable Solutions-On-a-Chip offer industry leading levels of performance and flexibility for Set Top Box and integrated Digital Television manufacturers delivering terrestrial, satellite and cable applications.

In the development of the SupraTV 150, Zoran focused on integrating functions traditionally performed at the system level and reducing the overall bill of materials for digital video products. Included in the SupraTV 150 are a soft modem codec, a digital timing oscillator, and smart card protection and control functions. These and other optimizations allow OEM manufacturers to build advanced systems for cost-sensitive markets.

"With the SupraTV 150, Zoran is adding a compelling cost-effective solution to our DTV product line that provides an excellent standard definition solution for our HDTV and DVD customers," said Jon Castor, senior vice president and general manager of Zoran's digital television division. "Set top box and digital television makers in the free-to-air and DVB markets can benefit from the performance, high integration and cost savings of the SupraTV 150. Zoran customers already using the Vaddis family of DVD products can take advantage of software and hardware synergies with the SupraTV 150."

"IMS Research estimates that the Asia Pacific market for digital set top boxes will be 16.9MU in 2004, growing to 23.2MU by 2006. This assumes that the Chinese market will grow from 4.2MU to 8.0MU over the same period. This is less than the estimate of SARFT, but in line with the expectations of the majority of Chinese STB manufacturers and TV operators that IMS Research interviewed," said Ian Weightman, vice president IMS Research.

The SupraTV 150 integrates a MIPS32 CPU complete with a Memory Management Unit, programmable multi-stream transport demultiplexer with conditional access, flexible audio DSP supporting MPEG, Dolby Digital, audio and WMA standards, MPEG video decoder, high quality video scalar with an advanced 2D graphics engine and digital video encoder.

OEM manufacturers developing new products can exploit the range of flexible features enabled in the SupraTV150: including: a programmable audio DSP on which new audio standards and post processing algorithms can rapidly be implemented, firmware acceleration for PictureCD and JPEG images, and picture-in-picture applications.

A wide array of system interfaces ensures that the SupraTV 150 can fully support the required connectivity for legacy analog signals and dual tuner architectures in the digital television and digital cable environments, while a programmable Guest bus enables glueless connections to storage media or peripheral devices including Common Interface, IEEE1394 and Ethernet ICs.

"After a detailed Bill-Of-Material analysis and comparison of functions needed for the cost sensitive China market, we selected the SupraTV 150 for a range of planned set top boxes," said Cao Li, general manager of TCL Corporation's Digital Electronics Division. "Zoran's high quality reference design plus its strong technical support and application software have enabled us to bring new products quickly to market." TCL is a major supplier of household electronics products in the China market.

Terry Lui, chief executive officer of DVN Holdings, a leading provider of digital transmission platforms for Pay TV and cable TV markets in China, said, "The SupraTV 150 offers the rich graphics and high performance we need to support our advanced program guide and other application software. Zoran is a long-term strategic partner and DVN intends to aggressively deploy cable set top boxes using the SupraTV 150 throughout China."

Frank Fischer, Vice President of Technology for Galaxis, a leading supplier of digital set top box technology for cable, satellite and digital terrestrial TV reception in the European market, noted "We're impressed with the scalability of Zoran's SupraTV family for addressing set top boxes ranging from cost-optimized to more feature-rich platforms integrating DVD and time-shifting functions on our Convergence Linux or MHP software."

Morris Arditti, vice president of Business Development and Engineering for Gradiente, the largest consumer electronics company in Latin America, commented, "Zoran's SupraTV family offers the right combination of low cost expandability for us to deliver even more exciting digital television products. Zoran's proven audio-video decoding and system development expertise should help us to accelerate our time to market when compared to other competitive solutions."

Samples of the SupraTV 150 with supporting reference design, integrated development environment, and proven silicon software libraries are available now for customer development projects.

The SupraTV150 will be demonstrated by invitation at Zoran's IBC customer meeting suite located in the RAI Convention Center.

About Zoran Corporation
Zoran Corporation, based in Sunnyvale, California, is a leading provider of digital solutions-on-a-chip for applications in the growing consumer electronics markets. With two decades of expertise developing and delivering digital signal processing technologies, Zoran has pioneered high-performance digital audio, video, and imaging applications. Zoran's proficiency in integration delivers major benefits for OEM customers, including greater capabilities within each product generation, reduced system costs, and shorter time to market. Zoran-based DVD, digital camera, DTV, and imaging products have received recognition for excellence and are now in millions of homes worldwide. With headquarters in the U.S. and operations in Canada, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and UK, Zoran may be contacted on the World Wide Web at www.zoran.com or at 408-523-6500.

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