Leading Companies Establish The Universal Home API Forum To Create Standards For The Converging Consumer Electronics Industry

Universal Home Application Programming Interface Dramatically Reduces Time And Expense of Software Application Development For The Connected Home

3-Nov-04

A group of leading consumer electronics (CE) and semiconductor companies including Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Royal Philips Electronics, HP, the Digital TV Industry Alliance of China (DTVIA) and ACCESS Co., Ltd., today announced the formation of the Universal Home Application Programmer Interface (UHAPI) Forum. The UHAPI Forum will standardize hardware-independent application programming interfaces (APIs) for analog and digital televisions, set top boxes, DVD players and recorders, personal video recorders (PVRs), home servers and other consumer audio/video (A/V) devices. The Forum invites other organizations to contribute to the UHAPI specification process and implement the UHAPI specification in their respective consumer A/V products. Today's CE devices are characterized by a rapid increase of functions and features. Furthermore, convergence is blurring the boundaries between traditional device categories. As a result, the amount of software in most CE products grows quickly. This creates an urgent need for a stable, hardware-independent API to bridge the middleware and application software from independent software vendors (ISVs) and CE vendors with the semiconductor solutions from integrated circuit (IC) manufacturers. The objective of the UHAPI is to serve as that bridge between ISVs, CE companies and semiconductor companies. With the UHAPI implementation, ISVs and CE vendors can focus on developing new, innovative functions and features rather than dealing with the complex task of writing software code to a unique semiconductor hardware architecture for each product. Ultimately, CE silicon, products, systems and software applications will exhibit greater interoperability. This will also result in faster time-to-market for new features and products for the home. The UHAPI consists of a set of hardware-independent software interfaces for configuring and controlling the A/V-related components of a consumer market semiconductor platform. The UHAPI complements leading operating systems and standards across the industry. The UHAPI Forum is currently working on the UHAPI 1.0 specification for Analogue and Digital Television. The UHAPI 1.0 specification will enable the creation of middleware and application software on top of semiconductor-based systems for analogue and digital televisions and set-top boxes. The Forum plans to finalize, approve and publish this specification in January 2005. A beta-version of the UHAPI specification is currently available to members of the UHAPI Forum. The future UHAPI 1.1 specification will include support for DVD playback, DVD recording and PVR functionality. Other applications and consumer functions can be added in due course. For more information, visit http://www.uhapi.org

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