Zenverge (formerly Xilient) was founded in July 2005 to develop “advanced, cost-effective solutions for content storage, playback, interoperability, mobility and networking in the next generation of digital media products.” The company has received two rounds of funding from Norwest Venture Partners, DCM Doll Capital Management and Motorola Ventures. Since receiving its initial funding, the company has added over 50 engineers with an average of more than 15 years experience and several PhDs who contributed to MPEG-2 and H.264 specifications. Zenverge became fully operational in early 2006.

Digital media ICs are becoming impractically complex, expensive, and power hungry as the number of media formats and the need for transcoding, in addition to encoding and decoding, has grown. In addition to the traditional functions of decoding and encoding, digital media ICs should be capable of Transcoding (the ability to translate data from one compression format to another), Transscaling (the ability to scale an image up and down the resolution spectrum), Transrating (the ability to change the bit rate on the fly with low latency to cope with a constantly changing network bandwidth), and Transcripting (the ability to rapidly decrypt, manipulate and encrypt data to ensure security).

Zenverge is focused on smart, high performance transcoders for HD convergence. The company is a developer of Advanced Media ICs built around the patented ZEN architecture, a core technology for next generation digital media devices. Its HD convergence ICs will replace multiple large and power-hungry media processors with a single chip, multi-format, multi-HD stream transcoder and codec IC.

Zenverge ICs are capable of addressing advanced digital media requirements in every step of the end-to-end media flow, from the broadcast center to the home. Target markets include service provider set-top boxes and media gateways, consumer electronics such as Blu-ray recorders/players and HDTVs, notebook and desktop media PCs, and headend video networking equipment.

Zenverge recently introduced the Zen Entertainment Nexus (ZEN), a new architecture for digital HD convergence. Implemented in a family of single-chip Media ICs, this technology is claimed to be the first to support transcoding, decoding and encoding of multiple formats at up to 4 times HD performance or up to four simultaneous HD streams. The company has currently filed 22 patents related to this architecture and is in the process of filing many more.

Unlike competitive approaches, the ZEN architecture delivers unprecedented performance and efficiency by using a single high-performance hardware acceleration pipeline that is programmable at the module level. By taking advantage of the functional commonalities in encoding and decoding as well as different compression formats, this patent-pending architecture delivers unrivaled performance levels capable of supporting up to four HD streams. Moreover, this performance scales with the resolution of each stream, thus supporting up to 40X real-time performance at portable device resolutions.

Zenverge has leveraged the company’s extensive expertise in algorithms and ASIC design to create a revolutionary, high-performance, low-latency video pipeline capable of transcoding and decoding HD content up to 4 times faster than real time or lower resolution content up to 40 times faster. In addition, the Zenverge solution can simultaneously transcode up to 4 independent HD streams or up to 16 independent SD streams along with supporting full encode of HD content. By designing the video features as a single pipeline, the architecture can scale with process technology. In the future, it will be possible to process HD even faster, process more streams of HD, and at much higher resolutions (e.g. future TV formats such as 4Kx2K used by digital cinema today and planned for broadcast in Japan starting in 2011). Zenverge has filed 21 patents related to this architecture to date with many more in the pipe.

The ZEN architecture is implemented in a new family of Advanced Media ICs. The ZEN1 family includes the ZV100 and ZV150, which provide interoperability and increased storage in digital media devices by adapting formats, resolutions, bit rates and DRM schemes, and the ZV200, which adds a powerful network processor for seamless delivery of multiple high data rate streams.

All three devices offer complete transcoding, encoding and decoding capabilities in a single chip solution that delivers dramatic savings in PCB footprint and power dissipation relative to existing solutions.

The ZEN1 family is now available for sampling to select customers.

Amir Mobini, President, CEO and co-founder (Previously VP of Technology at Conexant and VP of Technology at GlobespanVirata via the acquisition of iCompression, where he served as engineerizng director. In 2002, Mobini and Masterson led the sale of the video group from GlobespanVirata to Conexant.)

Tony Masterson, COO, CTO & co-founder (previously VP of Engineering for Conexant and VP of Engineering at GlobespanVirata via the acquisition of iCompression

Ragho Rao, VP of WW Sales (previously VP of EMEA sales at Marvell and VP of APAC sales at GlobeSpanVirata/Conexant)

Toshio Matsumoto, VP, Sales & Marketing, APAC (previously Director of MPEG CODEC Products at Conexant via the acquisition of the GlobespanVirata’s video business, formerly iCompression, where he served as Director of Sales and Marketing)

Kent Goodin, VP of Engineering (previously EVP of Engineering & Technology at Silicon Optix)

Deb Chatterjee, VP, Software and Algorithms (previously co-founder and VP of Software at Xambala, Senior Director of Software Technology at PortalPlayer, and Director of Software at iCompression)