Clientele: from blue-chip to cheapC-Cube's award-winning engineering team has Hollywood steamed. Top-notch digital video products have won the company some of the biggest clients in the digital video industry, including Apple, DEC, Samsung, and Sun Microsytems. But much to the chagrin of the folks in La-La land, the company's products are also favorites of video pirates in China, who use C-Cube's video compression chips to make cheap, counterfeit copies of Hollywood movies.
Equally diverse products
Based in Milpitas, California, C-Cube designs chips that allow digital video to be transmitted efficiently and shared by a variety of products, including CD-ROMs, computers, and televisions. The growing popularity of formats such video CDs and videoconferencing has kept the company's sales on the upswing. With a broad-based clientele, C-Cube's chips can be found in products ranging from computers and camcorders to set-top cable boxes and telephone distributions systems.
The electronics wizard
Founded in 1988, the company's name represents the convergence of video technology in the consumer electronics, communications, and computer markets. The company's first major product came in 1990, with the introduction of a JPEG chip for compression of still images. Two years later, C-Cube unveiled a MPEG chip for audio and video compression. C-Cube named William O'Meara, a co-founder of chipmaker LSI Logic, CEO in 1991. O'Meara geared the company toward the consumer electronics and communications markets. C-Cube began providing video encoding technology for Hughes Electronics' DirecTV satellite television in 1993, and went public the following year.
At the digital forefront
In 1995, C-Cube won Alphastar and Echostar digital broadcast satellite systems as clients, as well as Sony Corporation, which chose C-Cube's chips for its new line of video CD players. The company bought Divicom, a leader in digital video networking products, in 1996. The same year, rising decoder sales in the Asia-Pacific region caused C-Cube's sales to zoom. The company unveiled ZiVA in 1997, a new digital video disk chip aimed at lowering the cost of digital video players; unveiled the DVxpress-MX chip in 1998, which allows same-system digital and MPEG video data mixing; and in 1999 released the DVxplore, the first single-chip MPEG-2 codec to allow consumers to record and edit onto DVD, CD-R or PC disk drives. C-Cube claimed the title of number one supplier of MPEG digital video silicon for the third straight year in 1999. That same year, the company made history by making the largest shipment of DVD chips in a three month period, distributing over one million.
New directions
Big changes have come to C-Cube in 2000 as a result of Harmonic Inc.'s $1.7 billion agreement to purchase C-Cube's subsidiary DiviCom Inc. in October 1999. The union was completed in May 2000 after C-Cube spun off its semiconductor business as part of the process. Within the same month, Umesh Padval became president and CEO after his two-year term as president of C-Cube Semiconductor. Previously at VLSI Technology, and Advanced Micro Devices, Padval brings 16 years of experience in the industry to C-Cube.
C-Cube started off strong in Y2K, coming together with Planetweb in January to build Internet-ready platforms for digital video products. This alliance allows manufacturers to integrate e-mail and Web browsing into consumer electronic products, such as DVD players and digital video recorders. Electronics giant Sony Corporation teamed up with C-Cube in April 2000 to supply professional VTRs with MPEG codec solutions. The following month, Motorola Corporation selected C-Cube's AViA@TV silicon product for use in its European interactive digital set-top boxes.
