SAN MATEO, Calif. — Yet another platform war appears to be brewing in consumer electronics. Armed with system-level chips, Philips Semiconductors and STMicroelectronics are stepping into the design breach between analog and digital TV.
The two chip giants believe the time is ripe for a platform approach to TV design as the cost of silicon drops and as system OEMs' software investments in digital consumer appliance development spiral upward.
"What killed advanced digital TV in the past was the significant cost penalty for hardware," said Leon Husson, executive vice president of consumer business at Philips Semiconductors.
Transition tamers
The weapons in ST's and Philips' new assault on the problem are software intellectual property and modular hardware building blocks ranging from single-chip analog TV solutions to very-long-instruction-word (VLIW) cores. Both companies claim their arsenals yield TV platforms that are cost-effective and practical, easing the pain of the analog-to-digital-TV transition.
The goal is to let consumer OEMs reconfigure their TV designs without hardware changes or extensive rewrites of the software stacks, said Philips' Husson.
Husson said his company is in the final stages of an agreement with a group of companies, including Sony, Samsung and Philips Consumer Electronics, that plan to adopt its Digital Video Platform.
STMicroelectronics, meanwhile, has signed a five-year agreement with Thomson Multimedia to collaborate on digital consumer systems-on-chip. ST unveiled its hardware and software TV platform, called CTV100, at the recent Consumer Electronics Show. CTV100 lets all signal processing be handled in digital, whether the incoming TV input signal is digital or analog.
"Digital processing is now cheaper than analog processing" on a TV that offers 100-Hz progressive scanning, said Philippe Geyres, corporate vice president and general manager of the consumer and microcontroller groups at ST.
Path to digital TV
The CTV100 comprises two chips: an analog TV front end, the STV2310, that converts analog input into a digital CCIR stream for progressive scanning, and the STV3500, which integrates a 32-bit ST20 processor core and a 100-Hz upconverter. The combo today enables design of a midrange to high-end analog TV capable of digital processing to display 100-Hz progressive-scanning video. Down the road, the consumer manufacturer could spin a TV-DVD or TV-set-top box based on the same architecture, Geyres said.
The platform lets OEMs leverage the same programming environment broadly implemented today in ST20 core-based satellite set-tops and DVD players, Geyres said.
He said the platform protects consumer OEMs' software investment and lowers their digital TV development risks, adding, "This establishes the simplest path to DTV."
Separately from the CTV100 announcement, ST unveiled a VLIW microprocessor core, the ST210, at CES in a demo running a full-screen, high-quality MPEG-4 decoding application. The core, based on technology ST developed with Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, processes audio and video bit streams. The ST210 executes four instructions per clock cycle, allowing the equivalent of 1-GHz RISC performance while maintaining the low-power benefits of a 250-MHz clock frequency, Geyres said.
Philips, for its part, is leveraging its single-chip analog TV solution, called Ultimate One Chip/Plus, to ease the digital transition. The initial Ultimate One Chip is a TV signal processor, teletext/closed-caption decoder, graphics generator and microcontroller core with an extended 80C51 instruction set, allowing OEMs to build a single-chassis TV design that addresses all world markets and all sizes of televisions. The Ultimate One Chip/Plus will add such features as an advanced microcontroller and graphics generator.
Both Philips offerings include built-in hooks that make it easy to upgrade an analog TV to DTV. The hooks allow a separately designed Digital Video Platform (DVP)-based board to be bolted onto the existing analog TV chassis so that "consumer OEMs can easily retrofit their analog TVs," without a large investment in new designs or manufacturing process upgrades, Husson claimed.
Philips' DVP, now implemented in a single chip, is powered by a dual-processor architecture composed of a 32-bit MIPS RISC core and 32-bit TriMedia VLIW dedicated media processor. The chip "comes with a host of connectivity building blocks and interfaces including SPDIF, IEEE 1394, USB, Smart Card, PCI, MMI, UART and I2C," Husson said.
The DVP is a dedicated DTV solution. Its TriMedia-based VLIW core processes streaming-based content, while its MIPS RISC core handles memory-based instructions.
By integrating connectivity hardware blocks on-chip, Husson said, "the DVP allows consumer OEMs to remotely activate various connectivity options — DSL, cable modem, 1394 or USB — at a later date.
"TV manufacturers don't need to specify yet to which services their TV is to be connected," Husson said. "With DVP, we are building ahead an installed base of DTV that will become a connected TV of the future."
Philips Semiconductors has been touting a platform concept called Nexperia — a design methodology for intellectual-property reuse that it says ensures interoperability and minimum time-to-market. DVP is the first full implementation of the Nexperia concept.
Home servers in focus
Mark Samuel, set-top marketing director at Philips Semiconductors, said DVP is getting noticed just as home server products are entering the spotlight. Two such offerings, Moxi's Media Center and Pioneer's Digital Library, premiered at CES.
Moxi Media Center, an all-in-one home entertainment platform, combines an advanced digital cable or satellite receiver with a personal video recorder, CD/DVD player, music jukebox, Internet gateway and home media server. While DVP might play a role in such a home server system, Samuel said, "many consumer system OEMs are asking us if we can offer them more down-to-earth solutions."
Husson agreed. "We don't necessarily believe in a fat server-type architecture designed to sit somewhere in a utility closet at home," he said. "We expect that the transition from the currently standalone analog TV to a connected home system [plugged into a variety of services] will evolve much more slowly and naturally." With DVP, Philips said it can eventually offer modular solutions that enable such a migration.
Both ST's and Philips' platforms come with a complete library of software modules, including an application programming interface and a suite of electronic program guide, teletext, tele-Web and other applications software.
ST's STV2310 is priced at $5 each and its STV3500 at $10, both in quantities of 100,000 units. Philips' DVP is priced at around $35 for the hardware and software, according to Samuel.
