Platform optimises integrated digital television

Reference design platform is optimised for IDTV designs based on Toshiba's proven Donau-LC SoC for consumer digital media applications.

Toshiba Electronics Europe has released a reference design platform optimised for integrated digital television (IDTV) designs, combining the hardware functions and interfaces required for an LCD-TV with Aurora middleware by Cabot Communications enabling a feature-rich digital media solution.

The new reference design combines an Alps tuner and front-end with single-stream standard definition decoding as well as the sound-interface, AV interfaces to matrix switch, colour-decoder and scaler functions required to support the functions of an LCD-TV system.

These functions combine with the advanced capabilities of Toshiba's proven Donau-LC SoC for consumer digital media applications.

Developers can also take advantage of integrated solutions to powerful-but-expected features of modern LCD-IDTVs, including Dolby ProLogic, Virtual Dolby, SRS True Surround and Common Interface, IDE interface for PVR support, and USB2.0 host.

The platform is built around the TC90408FG Donau-LC digital media SoC, which combines Toshiba's Media embedded Processor (MeP) architecture with the Toshiba TX49 L3 64bit embedded RISC processor with unified file system as host.

It provides a four-plane video and graphics engine capable of progressive scan conversion with pixel-accurate on screen display (OSD) at panel resolutions up to 1080p (full-HD panels).

The MeP modules support dual-stream MPEG-2 video decoding as well as three-stream audio decoding to AAC, MPEG and AC-3 standards, allowing developers to quickly implement differentiating features such as audio description or bilingual audio decoding.

All necessary demodulation circuitry, interfaces and controllers are also integrated on-chip, including an onboard COFDM (coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexer) demodulator for DVB-T applications that meets international specifications including ETSI 300 744 (DVB-T), Nordig-II, Nordig-Unified and DTG.

The reference platform is offered complete with an optimised PCB design, enabling a compact solution capable of supporting up to 64Mbyte DRAM and up to 16Mbyte NOR Flash.

The Aurora XT middleware stack meets European-wide DTV standards, country- and region-specific profiles and local receiver specifications, and supports multiple languages, electronic programme guides (EPGs), parental ratings, channel ordering, subtitles and software update mechanisms.

At the operating system level, the Emerald IDTV reference platform runs on Linux, delivering advantages for developers including a robust and mature kernel, integrated connectivity features and the proven standard Linux file system, as well as royalty free use and the availability of free tool chains.

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