Zoran Corporation was a multinational digital technology company, founded in 1981 and headquartered in Silicon Valley, that was predominantly focused on designing and selling SoC (System on a Chip) integrated circuits for consumer electronics applications.

Zoran was incorporated in the state of Delaware and had offices in Canada, China, England, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the US.

Around 2008 and 2009, Zoran was successful as a supplier of cost-effective integrated chips for LCD TVs supporting the ATSC standards used for HDTV broadcast in the US.

Zoran also offered to third parties chip design IP (intellectual property) cores for decoding and encoding NTSC, PAL or SECAM television signals.

[7] In 1997 Zoran acquired CompCore Multimedia, a provider of software-based compression products and a designer of IP cores for video and audio decoder integrated circuits.

[6] Although, unlike some competitors, the company had not participated in the first major revenue opportunity for high-volume MPEG-decoding chips, the Chinese Video CD player boom of the late 1990s based on MPEG-1 decoding technology, increasing sales of chips for DVD player applications launched Zoran into a period of strong revenue growth and expansion.

[citation needed] By 2005, its COACH product line for digital camera processors, which built on its earlier JPEG expertise, had started to become significant and would be the largest revenue contributor in Zoran's later years.

[26] On 21 February 2011, Zoran announced it was merging with CSR, a global leader in wireless connectivity (including WLAN and Bluetooth) and location chip technology such as GPS based in the UK.

The discontinuation of the DTV and silicon tuner divisions was announced at the end of 2011, involving the layoff of 800 employees,[29] which some say caused CSR's share price to jump up substantially.

Apart from semiconductor chips, Zoran also commonly provided customers with associated reference designs including a printed circuit board layout and a bill of materials with required components for common configurations, as well associated firmware and software tools, allowing a customer to bring an end product (for example, a DVD player or digital camera) to market faster with a reduced amount of investment while requiring less technical expertise.

Examples of successful chip families sold by Zoran include the Vaddis product line that was widely used in DVD players, especially in earlier brand-name models with upscaled HDMI output (using Zoran's HDXtreme upscaler chip) and by numerous low-cost manufacturers in China, the COACH image processor/video processor product line for digital cameras that saw widespread adoption among both major brands and lower cost manufacturers in Asia and shipped hundreds of millions of units,[32] and the SupraHD product line of integrated SoC solutions for LCD TVs, primarily supporting the ATSC and NTSC standards for the US market.

[31] Other specific target applications included set-top boxes for digital TV deployment[31] in Asia, converter boxes facilitating the transition away from analog terrestrial television in the US,[citation needed] DVD recorders with the Activa product line featuring MPEG-2 encoding,[31] and high-end camera phones with APPROACH camera multimedia processors.