Nvidia Sees Its 3D Vision Business Growing 200 Percent This Year

Nvidia’s 3D Vision business will grow 200 percent this year as 3D technology takes hold in CE products and PCs, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said on a conference call. The expansion will be driven by a broader array of 3D Vision-capable products, including Acer’s 27-inch PC monitor, Dell’s XPS notebook with a 17-inch LCD and more than 500 3D-capable videogames and Blu-ray movies, Huang said.

There are about 425 3D Vision-certified PC games. Nvidia also launched 3dvisionlive.com to provide streaming video and photos, Huang said. 3D Vision also will benefit from Nvidia’s new GTX 580, 570 and 560 graphics processors, the latter two selling for $349 and $249, he said.

Nvidia has slowly expanded its 3D Vision business since signing a series of licensing agreements for LCDs in late 2009 with Chunghwa Picture Tubes, LG Display and Samsung (CED Nov 23/09 p5). In addition to licensing pacts, Nvidia has sold GeForce 3D Vision kits that include $199 active-shutter glasses. Nvidia doesn’t disclose 3D Vision-related revenue, but the technology is benefitting from PC system upgrades, Michael Hara, senior vice president of investor relations, told us. “More and more gamers as upgrading their systems to play 3D games,” Hara said. “What you are witnessing is companies building specific 3D systems. It will become a standard feature of high-end systems."

It wasn’t clear how 3D Vision will figure in Nvidia’s rapidly growing Tegra processor business. Hara declined comment on whether Nvidia’s Kal-El Tegra chip, which was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress this week, will be 3D-capable. Specs for the chip, which is sampling with customers, weren’t released. But the quad-core IC supports up to 2560x1600 resolution, has a 12-core Nvidia GPU and is designed for the low-power consumption needed for tablets and smartphone, Nvidia said. Kal-El will eventually replace the Tegra-2 processor being designed into a range of tablets from Asustek, NEC, Samsung and LG and Samsung smartphones. Kal-El is expected to ship for tablets in August and smartphones late this year, Hara said. The Tegra-2 chip is priced at $15 in volume, but the Kal-El will like command a premium, he said. “Tablets are more flexible from a design standpoint, and can highly leverage our work” with Google’s Honeycomb Android operating system, Hara said.

Kal-El is being built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing using a 40-nanometer process. While Nvidia has struggled with yield issues in the 40-nanometer process in the past, most of those issues have been resolved. While some analyst asked why Nvidia wasn’t moving the new chip to a 28-nanometer process, Huang said production has yet to begin with that technology. The 28-nanometer production is expected to start late this year, Huang said. “The 40 nanometer process is now in its third year and the yields are fabulous,” Huang said.

Nvidia has established a roadmap for Tegra that runs through 2014 and is working on projects “going out to 20 nanometers and beyond,” Huang said. As Nvidia moves to build the Tegra business, it’s coming off a year in which the chip generated $50-$60 million in revenue, including $30 million in Q4, Hara said. That’s short of Nvidia’s forecast for Tegra to have 2010 sales of $200 million. The shortfall was tied to a change in schedule due to Google’s gingerbread and honeycomb operating that were expected to arrive in 2010, but are hitting the market this year, Hara said.