SoCs take charge of digital TV receivers

Toshiba used last week's Mediacast 2004 as a platform to launch two powerful, compact, and highly integrated ICs for free-to-air and pay-TV digital television applications.

Toshiba used last week's Mediacast 2004 as a platform to launch two powerful, compact, and highly integrated ICs for free-to-air (FTA) and pay-TV digital television applications.

Codenamed Donau, the TC90400XBG and TC90400FG high-performance system-on-chip (SoC) devices will simplify the design and dramatically reduce the component count of consumer electronics products such as set top boxes (STBs), integrated digital televisions (iDTVs), personal video recorders (PVRs), and combination hard disk/DVD recorder systems.

Toshiba's TC90400XBG and TC90400FG combine the company's media embedded processor (MeP) architecture with a powerful 64bit embedded RISC host processor to create multimedia SoCs with compute performances of up to 650MIPS (at 180MHz).

The MeP architecture effectively frees the host processor from compute-intensive DVB and multimedia processing tasks and allows designers to choose cost-optimised solutions for digital video broadcast (DVB) applications.

These applications can range from single-stream-decoding, standard definition televisions to dual-stream decoding, high-end MHP (Multimedia Home Platform) and MHEG-5-based equipment.

In addition to European requirements, support for high-definition decoding with display in half horizontal resolution and HD-to-SD down-conversion makes the new ICs suitable for applications designed for use in the USA and Japan.

Based around the Toshiba TX49 64bit RISC processor core operating at up to 180MHz, the new ICs support a unified memory system as well as NAND and/or NOR Flash memory to keep system costs to a minimum.

The core is integrated with MeP modules that deliver digital media capabilities including dual-stream MPEG-2 video decoding, advanced audio processing allowing three stream audio decoding, program stream and transport stream processing, and a powerful multiplane graphics engine with hardware accelerator.

On-board interfaces and peripherals include 8 and 16bit ITU-601/656 inputs, two DVB common interfaces, two smart card interfaces, IDE connectivity, a USB 1.1 host controller, and external 8 and 16bit bus interfaces.

The integrated ICs also offer 32 PIO channels (pin shared), two I2C bus connections, four serial I/Os, two PWM channels, IR decoding, a real-time clock and three 24bit up-counter timers.

The processing, peripheral and interface functionality offered by the new ICs allows for direct connection of single- or dual-tuner digital tuner input, 4:2:2 video input, and DVD drives, hard disk drives and CD drives.

Up to 64Mbyte of Flash and between 8 and 64Mbyte of DDR-SDRAM memory can also be interfaced to the ICs.

Output capabilities include analogue video (CVBS, S-Video), 2 x 4:2:2 video, and RGB output (TC90400XBG only).

Commenting on the launch of the new ICs, Thomas Kuschel, Toshiba's Consumer IC Marketing Manager, states: "Demand for DVB and MHP-enabled equipment is set to grow rapidly as digital content providers seek to deliver faster and ever-more comprehensive interactive services ranging from electronic programme guides to e-commerce".

"By offering single-chip SoCs to implement such functionality, Toshiba is providing STB and iDTV manufacturers with solutions that allow for the rapid design, prototyping and manufacture of end user equipment that addresses market requirements in terms of technology, performance, reliability and cost".

The TC90400XBG is supplied in a 272-pin PBGA package, and the TC90400FG is provided as a 208-pin QFP.

Samples and reference systems are available in Q3 2004, and mass production is scheduled for Q1 2005.

In addition to hardware, Toshiba also offers extensive software and development tools and support as part of the company's "Design and Verification Framework" model.

This support includes availability of the Linux DVB4.0 API and DirectFB Graphic Library, with digital TV middleware..

The Linux DVB API defines the application front-end including tuner and DVB demodulator, control for external hardware, a demultiplexer that filters the incoming DVB stream, and MPEG2 audio and video decoding.

DirectFB is a powerful and scalable library that provides hardware graphics acceleration, input device handling and abstraction, an integrated windowing system with support for translucent windows and multiple display layers on top of the Linux frame buffer device.

It is a complete hardware abstraction layer with software fallbacks for every graphics operation that is not supported by the underlying hardware.

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