ATI's plans to add HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) support to future chipset and graphics card products took a step closer to fruition yesterday when the company announced it has licensed HDMI technology from Analogix.

Neither firm disclosed the terms of the deal, which comes almost a month after ATI showed an upcoming Radeon Xpress chipset equipped with HDMI connectors. It demo'd the technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

HDMI is a standard connector for linking up HD-oriented computing and consumer electronics kit, providing sufficient bandwidth for the transmission of HD content - plus room to support the HDCP (High Definition Content Protection) DRM scheme.

Last week, ATI CEO Dave Orton said the company was looking to step up its acquisition programme.

"We do about an acquisition a year and they tend to be 30 to 80 people, technology-based acquisitions. Even though we are looking to accelerate (mergers and acquisitions), we are also looking to make sure we are prudent about it," he told the Reuters newsagency.

"We’ve got an active funnel, but there's nothing major pending." ®

Related stories

ATI unveils Mobility Radeon X1800, X1800 XT (7 March 2006)
Tul ships Radeon X1300 board overclocked 150MHz (22 February 2006)
Sony touts 'thrills'n'stills' HD camcorder (21 February 2006)
ATI R590 said to ship next month (15 February 2006)
IBM launches chipset on unlicensed waveband (7 February 2006)
ATI launches mobile workstation GPU with 12 pixel engines (6 February 2006)
ATI ships Radeon X1900 XT, XTX and CrossFire Edn (24 January 2006)
ATI Radeon Xpress to support HDMI (10 January 2006)
Samsung to ship Blu-ray 'first' with April player launch (5 January 2006)
ATI back in the black (22 December 2005)
PC, CE firms to develop 'unified' display connector (21 December 2005)
ATI pitches for PC-TV convergence (20 September 2005)