Toshiba Corp and C-Cube Microsystems Inc have announced a single- chip DVD playback device that the two jointly developed for both notebook and desktops. The motherboard-ready chip, called the Ziva-PC, is being billed as the first hardware DVD device that leverages the Windows 98’s built-in DVD features and meets all PC98 requirements. It’s also being touted as offering the lowest overall system cost for hardware DVD playback as well as the lowest power consumption, at 1.5 watts or less. The low power consumption is expected to be a main selling point to notebook OEMs. Ziva-PC includes a Mobile-PCI interface, an SDRAM interface and Bus Mastering with scatter and gather Direct Memory Access.
