After many years' worth of unrealized expectations, VOIP (voice-over-Internet Protocol) adoption is finally exploding, fueled by a steadily broadening embrace of broadband (see "The human touch keeps the elderly and disabled technology-connected," EDN, Dec 17, 2004, pg 47). Analyst company JupiterResearch, for example, recently predicted, in Broadband Telephony: Leveraging Voice Over IP to Facilitate Competitive Voice Services , that VOIP-telephony services in the United States would expand, from approximately 400,000 US households by the end of last year, to 12.1 million households, or approximately 10% of all US households, by 2009 (www.jupitermedia.com/corporate/releases/04.10.07-newjupresearch.html).

With that first-generation acceptance hurdle surmounted, semiconductor companies such as Texas Instruments and their system partners such as Wintech Digital Systems (www.wintechdigital.com) are focusing their attention on the logical next step: integrated audio-plus-video phones. Technohistorians among you might recall that AT&T conceptually first unveiled these phones at the 1964 World's Fair. TI's claimed "ready-for-production," $6495 Videophone development platform includes two hardware boards based on TI's 600-MHz TMS320DM64x digital-media processor, two 5-in. LCDs, two cameras, a network switch and hub, and a full suite of application software. Prototype systems that TI based on the MPEG-4 Part 10—that is, MPEG-4 AVC, or H.264—baseline-profile video codec and demonstrated at January's Consumer Electronics Show, required 128 to 256 kbps of sustained bandwidth and delivered tolerable, albeit low-resolution, image quality and frame rates.

Texas Instruments, 1-972-995-2011, www.ti.com.