Texas Instruments to acquire National Semiconductor

Texas Instruments Inc. signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire National Semiconductor Corp. for $6.5 billion in cash, the company said Monday April 4. 

The deal, which remains subject to regulatory review and the approval of National's shareholders, would bring together two of the longest-running semiconductor companies and two of the largest vendors of analog chips. 

TI ranked No. 4 in the world in overall semiconductor sales in 2010 with revenue of $11.9 billion. The addition of National's revenue would have made TI the No. 3 chip vendor in 2010, ahead of Toshiba and trailing only Intel Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., according to Gartner. National had revenue of $1.42 billion in its fiscal 2010.

Multimedia Grand Challenge 2011

What problems do Yahoo, HP, Nokia, Technicolor, 3DLife and other companies see in the future of multimedia? The Multimedia Grand Challenge is a set of problems from industry leaders, geared to engage the Multimedia research community in solving relevant, interesting and challenging questions about the industry’s 2-5 year horizon for multimedia.

2011 Challenges are the following:

• HP Challenge: High Impact Visual Communication
• Technicolor Challenge: Precise Event Recognition and Description from Video Excerpts
• Nokia Challenge: Visual Landmark Recognition
• Yahoo! Video Challenge: Robust Automatic Segmentation of Video According to Narrative Themes
• Yahoo! Image Challenge: Novel Image Understanding
• 3Dlife Challenge: Realistic Interaction in Online Virtual Environments

Winners of the competition will be announced at the ACM Multimedia Conference 2011 in Scottsdale, Arizona.

DVB-3DTV Specification Published

On February 17 the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) Steering Board approved the DVB-3DTV specification, which has been published as BlueBook A154 "Frame Compatible Plano-Stereoscopic 3DTV".

Plano-stereoscopic imaging systems deliver two images (left and right) that are arranged to be seen simultaneously, or near simultaneously, by the left and right eyes. Viewers perceive increased depth in the picture, which becomes more like the natural binocular viewing experience.

The DVB-3DTV specification also provides a mechanism that allows subtitles and other onscreen graphics to be best positioned so that they can be viewed correctly in the stereoscopic picture.

Following the recent approval and publication of the DVB-3DTV specification, a free EBU Technical Webinar will be held on April 14th with David Wood, live from the NAB Convention in Las Vegas, and Yvonne Thomas, live from the EBU Headquarters in Geneva. You can register and join the 3DTV Webinar from the website of EBU Technical.


Source: DVB press release and DVB news.