Coprocessor covers interoperability and protection

Network multimedia coprocessor supports leading industry interoperability standards and is first wired Ethernet coprocessor to support Digital Living Network Alliance guidelines.

Consumers today are acquiring, viewing and managing a vast amount of digital content and need devices to communicate with each other in order to share content.

Now, SMSC has introduced its LAN9131, the industry's first high-performance network multimedia coprocessor.

Based on RipStream technology, which combines support of multiple high definition (HD) audio/video (A/V) streams, software protocol stack management and security, this industry first solution delivers time to market advantages and reduces development risk for customer designs.

Target applications include network-enabled HD TVs, set-top boxes, digital video recorders and home media servers, among others.

The LAN9131 offers support for the leading industry interoperability standards and is the only wired Ethernet coprocessor solution to currently support Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) guidelines.

"The LAN9131 multimedia coprocessor is a key development in the evolution of SMSC's solutions portfolio", said Johnson Tan, Vice President and General Manager of Connected Home Media at SMSC.

"The investments we've made in creating a home multimedia solution that works in conjunction with existing system-on-chip (SoC) processor environments will enable designers to get to market fast with high-performance systems that support multiple HD streams".

"The ease of design, low development risk and reduction of overhead make it possible for designers to virtually 'plug in' the system while still adopting key functionality such as encryption/decryption".

Built for high performance and flexibility, the LAN9131 leverages the 32bit ARM926 core to offload the main SoC's high TCP/IP processing burden while supporting multiple HD A/V streams with what are currently the best available Fast Ethernet datarates.

The main SoC can now partition out CPU intensive networking, interoperability and content-protection functions to the LAN9131 coprocessor, allowing the SoC to focus its finite resources on core multimedia and user interface applications.

Additional offloading from the main SoC is achieved through the LAN9131's implementation of two dedicated bidirectional transport stream interfaces (TSIs).

This enables the multimedia coprocessor to assign both audio and video packets without interfering with the main SoC's system bus.

Also, the LAN9131's hardware-based AES-128 function block greatly accelerates digital rights management (DRM) content protection schemes such as Digital Transmission Content Protection over Internet Protocol (DTCP-IP) and Windows Media DRM (WMDRM 10) without burdening the main SoC.

The support of DLNA and associated content-protection standards such as DTCP-IP and WMDRM 10 is an important cornerstone to the company's ability to serve consumer electronics applications, especially in an environment where devices are increasingly becoming networked and expected to share encrypted high definition content.

The LAN9131 engineering samples are available today.

Qualification samples are expected to be available in December 2006 with mass production samples in the first quarter of calendar 2007.

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