IBMís ""Set-Top-Box-On-A-Chip"" To Drive Interactive TV

IBM announced at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas last week that it has integrated many of the components of a digital television set-top box (STB) onto a single chip. This integration can lower the cost of manufacturing these devices and allow cable and satellite companies to offer new services to customers, such as interactive digital TV, telephone services, and Internet access, all from a standard TV set. Set-top boxes are commonly used to connect televisions to cable broadcasting systems. However, cable companies are exploring ways to deliver additional services over those same cable connections. These new services require more sophisticated set-top box designs which, until now, have often proven too expensive or too complex. With this one chip from IBM, consumers may be able to receive a new generation of interactive entertainment and e-commerce services. ""The dynamics of how people use everyday appliances, such as televisions, are rapidly changing,"" said Paul Belluz, Director of IBMís Research Technology Products and Digital Video Product Group. ""This chip capability can help service providers and original equipment manufacturers to provide broader access to the Internet, news and information services, home shopping, banking, and video on demand in a way that is as easy to use as a TV."" IBMís single-chip set-top box controller supports a trend referred to as ""pervasive computing"" - where computing power and Internet access are being designed into a wide range of business and consumer devices. Pervasive computing is being driven, in part, by the ability to place more and more functions onto a single chip, making it economically and technically feasible to expand the reach of computing in common appliances such as televisions. Single chip solutions are, in turn, being made possible by IBM's advanced chip-making technologies, such as copper, silicon-on-insulator, silicon germanium, and merged logic/DRAM. ""With IBMís advanced set-top box chipset and Open TVís rich middleware solution, our full-featured set-top box has allowed us to launch a successful satellite service with market-leading interactive features and services such as online shopping, advertising, and weather forecasts,"" confirmed Gilles Maugars, Senior Vice President and Chief Technical Officer of TPS, the most recent service supplier to the French market. ""IBMís technology provides the features, performance, and flexibility to enable the growth of this new class of customer services."" ""IBMís offering will allow us to quickly deploy a digital interactive cable system to millions of subscribers,"" said Mr. Cheng Shi Ping, the CEO and Chairman of Sichuan NewTech Digital Equipment Co. Ltd., headquartered in ChengDU, Sichuan, Peoples Republic of China. ""We are most impressed with the technology and level of technical support provided by IBM and look forward to a mutually beneficial relationship."" The chip announced at NAB ë99 combines a 401 PowerPC engine, MPEG audio and video decode systems, on-board caches, an on-chip memory, and numerous peripheral units such as IEEE 1284, I2C interface, and smart card interface - in total, more than 30 cores from IBMís ASIC core library. IBMís design minimizes the workload of the on-chip PowerPC 401. This efficient architecture makes more MIPS available for current and future interactive services, allowing service providers to lengthen the field life of their products. A unified memory architecture provides configuration flexibility in its support of SDRAM, DRAM, ROM, and FLASH. The integration of a number of peripheral interfaces, including smart card, serial, and parallel ports allows designers to quickly architect set-top designs. The digital audio and video subsystem delivers the high-quality sound and video that are the hallmarks of advanced digital television. This new chip capability can significantly improve graphical user interfaces electronic commerce. To assist the set-top box manufacturerís time to market, IBM offers evaluation kits that combine a development board and tools with support for industry-leading operating systems and middleware, such as pSOS from ISI, OpenTV, and Media Highway. Additionally, the IBM PowerPC Embedded Tools Program provides access to many third-party tools to meet customer specific development needs. According to the market research firm GartnerGroup Dataquest, the semiconductor content of the digital set-top-box market is currently $2 billion, growing to nearly $3 billion in 2002. (""Consumer Electronics Semiconductor Forecast: Growth Opportunities at the Cutting Edge,"" December 1998) IBM has an existing presence in the digital video industry with well over one million PowerPC-based digital set-top decoders deployed to date and more than 100 patents in digital video. The digital set-top box integrated controllers are sampling now, with production volume planned in July 1999. The integrated controllers are formally referred to as: IBM39 STB01000 PBB 22C (MPEG audio) and IBM39 STB01010 PBB 22C (Dolby Digital audio). For more information about these and other IBM products, contact Barbara Brown at 973-331-1070 orr brown@rjstrikestrue.com.