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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Texas Instruments Inc. (NYSE:TXN - news) is using the strategy that made it the world's biggest mobile phone circuit supplier to try to dominate the faster growing video market, the company said late on Wednesday.

The Dallas-based company plans to introduce a new single chip platform -- called DaVinci -- which combines digital signal and general-purpose processing chips with all the software, design tools and accelerators needed to create the next generation of digital video products.

It's all the basic technology needed to make the latest televisions or video equipment, but in a single chip.

Texas Instruments, or TI, is building a single chip "platform" out of components and software that had required five to eight specialized chips to perform the same functions, it said.

Other major chip makers are pursuing platform strategies of their own. Centrino chips are an example of how Intel (Nasdaq:INTC - news) has bundled short-range wireless chips and software into a platform that now dominates the market for wireless laptops.

Using this strategy over the past decade to shrink multiple components onto a single chip, TI's OMAP wireless platform has become the brains for 50 percent of the world's mobile phones. Now TI hopes to define the standard for video chips.

"We are now going to do the same thing in video that OMAP had done for us in wireless handsets," Greg Delagi, the TI vice president and general manager of the company's non-wireless DSP systems business, said of DaVinci in a phone interview.

For example, one DaVinci-based TV digital set-top box will allow consumers to play and/or record movies while simultaneously video conferencing with friends. Alternately, DaVinci can be used in a video security system to identify a visitor at a door, unlock it and open it via their TV remote.

FAST GROWTH

DaVinci is based on TI's high-powered C64x Digital Signal Processor (DSP) and a general-purpose ARM (Nasdaq:ARMHY - news) processor.

According to market researcher Forward Concepts, the $6 billion DSP market is growing at a rate of 30 percent to 40 percent a year, with volumes led by mobile phone applications. "Video DSPs are growing faster than that," Delagi said.

DaVinci is designed to compete with video chips from Equator, a Pixelworks Inc. (Nasdaq:PXLW - news) unit, the TriMedia business of Philips (PHG.AS) and the Black Sun video system of perennial TI rival Analog Devices Inc. (NYSE:ADI - news), among others, he said.

In addition to the core semiconductor technology built by TI, the company has taken two years developing the software used to support the major types of video compression, digital rights management and other features that products such as television, videoconferencing, video surveillance require.

"TI is not doing anything it couldn't have done before," Forward Concepts industry analyst Will Strauss said. "It is just being more organized about it."

Instead of having to tailor its chips to each electronics customer it serves, TI is piling thousands of features onto a single chip, allowing customers to select from pre-existing functions as they use DaVinci-based chips to create new products.

Video products that took at least 18 months to develop in the past can be built in six to 12 months with DaVinci, Delagi said.

The chip will be available in sample amounts between now and the end of the year for electronics makers to begin building it into their video products , Delagi said.

Customers will begin seeing it in mainstream products starting next year, he said.

TI plans to unveil DaVinci at news conferences in New York and San Francisco on Thursday.