Mediatek products banned from United States

[Professur]

By INQUIRER staff: Thursday 29 September 2005, 08:30

ZORAN SAID the US International Trade Commission (ITC) has banned the importation of Mediatek technology into the country.
The banning order includes not only Mediatek optical disk controller chip, chipset, or storage products, but storage devices containing the chips. That will have a knock on effect on major PC manufacturers.

Zoran had claimed that a patent it owned, number 6,584,527 was infringed by the Taiwanese giant. The ITC order is not limited to previous generation Mediatek products, said Zoran. It said it includes all past, current and future products which are made by Mediatek customers using the chipsets. The ITC has also banned work around chips.

According to a statement from Zoran, firms affected by the ban, which takes place immediately, include Asus, Lite-On, MSI, TEAC, Ultima Electronics and others.

The firms have been issued immediate cease and desist orders by the ITC, said Zoran. The effect on distributors and dealers is bound to be widespread. µ

source

The price of CD and DVD players is about to follow oil prices.

 

[Luis G]

Right from the patent

A compact disk drive controller to control the access of information from an optical compact disk (CD) digital data storage device by a host computer using an integrated drive electronics (IDE) data bus or an industry standard architecture (ISA) data bus is disclosed. A digital signal processor (DSP) interface to the drive electronics of the CD drive, a dynamic random access memory (DRAM) controller, an error correction code (ECC) data corrector, an error detection and correction (EDC) device employing cyclical redundancy checking techniques (EDC/CRC), and a host computer interface are described.

What is claimed is:

1. An optical drive controller to control the communication of data between a storage medium in an optical drive device and a host computer via an IDE/ATA data bus, said data bus for receiving and transmitting data between said controller and said host computer, said optical drive device having drive electronics, said optical drive controller comprising:

a storage medium interface for receiving data from said storage medium;

data error detection and correction circuitry, said detection and correction circuitry including:

error correction circuitry for performing error correction on data received from said interface and generating corrected data, and

error detection circuitry for detecting errors in data prior to transmission to said host computer; and

a host interface connecting said host computer and said optical drive controller directly via an IDE/ATA data bus, said host interface operable to receive data addresses and commands from said host computer and transmit data to said host computer, and including an ATA command block register address at which to store sequentially contiguous bytes of command data, that are part of the same command, transmitted from the host computer in a single command transfer.

2. An optical drive controller to control the communication of data between a storage medium in an optical drive device and a host computer via an IDE/ATA data bus, said data bus for receiving and transmitting data between said controller and said host computer, said optical drive device having drive electronics, said optical drive controller comprising:

a storage medium interface to receive data from said storage medium;

data error detection and correction circuitry coupled to said storage medium interface, to provide error free data for transmission to said host computer; and

a host interface connecting said host computer and said optical drive controller directly via an IDE/ATA data bus, said host interface including a data port operable to receive data addresses and commands from said host computer and transmit data to said host computer, a multibyte command packet buffer operable, per command, to store sequentially contiguous bytes of command information received through the data port in a single command transfer.

3. An optical drive controller to control the communication of data between an optical storage medium in an optical drive device and a host computer via an IDE/ATA data bus, said data bus operable to receive and transmit data between said optical drive controller and said host computer,

wherein the improvement comprises:

a host interface to connect said host computer and said optical drive controller directly via said IDE/ATA data bus, said host interface including an ATA register address at which to receive data addresses and commands from said host computer and transmit data to said host computer, and a multibyte command packet buffer operable to sequentially store a packet of contiguous bytes of command information received through the ATA register address in a single command transfer.

So now, we have DVD drives (granted they are still optical) that use the SATA or an EIDE interface (which are not IDE, and in the case of EIDE it is called ATAPI), none of them connect to an ISA bus, and yet, they still banned them?