A new video standard enables a fourfold increase in the resolution of TV screens, and an MIT chip was the first to handle it in real time.
It took only a few years for high-definition televisions to make the transition from high-priced novelty to ubiquitous commodity — and they now seem to be heading for obsolescence just as quickly. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, several manufacturers debuted new ultrahigh-definition, or UHD, models (also known as 4K or Quad HD) with four times the resolution of today’s HD TVs.
In addition to screens with four times the pixels, however, UHD also requires a new video-coding standard, known as high-efficiency video coding, or HEVC. Also at CES, Broadcom announced the first commercial HEVC chip, which it said will go into volume production in mid-2014.