When Silicon Optix chief executive officer Paul Russo looks at a retail sales floor full of big-screen TVs, he sees opportunity.
As the boss of a Canada-based, privately held start-up company, Dr. Russo is sitting on top of a piece of electronic wizardry that until recently was used solely by the television broadcast industry as a video editing tool.
What his Realta chip does, and why it's a hot commodity, is clean up video images on the screens of LCD, plasma and digital projector screens at astonishing speed.
Shoppers who have seen the bright, sharp pictures in retail stores might wonder why these images might need work at all. In fact, when consumers take the sets home and start watching regular TV, the picture might not look as good as it did at the store.
The reason? While some shows are broadcast in the high definition format, most programming is still transmitted in standard definition (SD), a signal designed for the traditional screen. On HD screens, those SD signals often look muddy. But the Realta chip cleans up the signal and restores visual quality.
"Because of the way television is broadcast, essentially in two halves with the image being interlaced (reassembled at the screen), many processors can't handle all the information and simply discard it," said Silicon Optix spokesman Brian Hentschel. "The result is poorer quality."
While broadcasters and consumers ramp up to HDTV, there's a gap that Dr. Russo said the manufacturer-installed Realta can fill. Sales of HDTVs are expected to jump 71 per cent by 2009, according to analysts Parks Associates, so it's a wave that has yet to crest.
In the past year, Russo has focused on the consumer electronics market, working with such manufacturers as Denon, Yamaha, NEC, Digital Projection, Toshiba and Olevia (formerly Syntax).
"We have the market to ourselves," said Dr. Russo of the five-year-old venture, which he founded after another successful start up, Genesis Microchip Inc. "And we're going after the luxury end of the market."
Along the way, Silicon Optix bought into Teranex, a supercomputer venture that owned a technology acquired from Lockheed Martin Corp. Teranex sells that technology -- a super-fast video processing system -- to such television clients around the world as NBC, CBS, ABC and others in Japan, Australia and China, where the company's $60,000 (U.S.), rack-mounted boxes are used to clean up video prior to broadcast.
The trick Russo and his team of engineers performed was taking the workings of that large box and reducing it to a single wafer chip without performance loss at the consumer level. The HQV (Hollywood Quality Video) chip known as Realta launched in 2004.
"It's really a supercomputer on a chip," said Dr. Russo, who is also an outside director of graphic-card maker ATI Technologies Inc., and whose Markham, Ont., offices are a few minutes north of Silicon Optix in the north end of Toronto where Silicon Alley begins at Sheppard Avenue West.
Lockheed Martin spent more than $100-million (U.S.) developing its system to enhance images garnered from aerial surveillance, and Dr. Russo said an additional $100-million will have been invested by the time the company turns a profit or goes public.
"We're not profitable yet," he said, though revenue will exceed $30-million this year. The company has staff in Orlando, Fla., Toronto and San Jose, Calif., with a head count of about 130. It contracts out manufacturing to IBM and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
A key advantage of the chip is that it's not hard wired, he said.
"It's a software platform like a computer, so when we have an upgrade to the algorithm, we can simply update the software," he said. "That way it's never obsolete."
In simple terms, the chip's software analyzes each pixel in a video image and decides what that pixel is and what it should be.
For example, one problem with image quality is noise, akin to specks of dust on a photograph. The chip and software clean up the noise, and that's not as easy as it sounds. A high definition video image might have more than 2 million pixels, or about 74 million bits of information. For video running at 30 frames a second, that's more than 2 billion bits that must be processed each second.
In addition to reducing noise, the processor performs other operations such as de-interlacing, format conversion and detail enhancement. This means the chip has to perform something like a trillion calculations a second.
TV manufacturers are installing the chip in their products and promoting it with stickers -- the equivalent of the "Intel Inside" branding.
The chip performs other tasks, such as allowing images to be projected onto angular or curved surfaces without distortion. It also converts standard signals to HD signals and performs on-the-fly image stabilization and corrections.
And with the industry changing quickly -- for example, the arrival of other technologies such the Blu-Ray DVD format, which can carry much more information than the current red-laser technology -- consumers can update software rather than replace hardware to stay compatible.
Image test-drive
When it comes to high definition television, what you see in the store isn't necessary what you'll get at home.
Today's large-format HDTV screens -- plasma, LCD or digital light projectors -- look great on the sales floor, playing content carefully selected to show off their best attributes.
But how can consumers compare the pictures to determine whether they are getting the best image resolution for their buck?
While Silicon Optix's main business is building video-processing equipment and chips, it also offers an affordable product that allows consumers to "test drive" a screen and measure its image resolution.
The HQV Benchmark DVD provides 10 basic ways to test the image quality of an HDTV set or DVD player. Each test explains what to look for and how to assess the results. The company suggests that prospective buyers take the package into their local store before buying.