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BRIAN SANTO
The vision of a networked home connected to the Internet has a lot of people excited. There's just one little problem - the babel of compression types, encryption methods, data formats, transmission techniques and other standards that make it difficult to get everything communicating properly with everything else.
Furthermore, while most consumer equipment today is still primarily analog, including the TV, the phone, the camcorder and the VHS deck, digital is intruding in the form of cable or satellite set-top boxes, DVD systems, MP3 players, PVR systems and other products.
Bob Saffari, director-advanced video products at C-Cube Microsystems, has a lot of those products in his own home.
"I tried to hook them all up; it took me half a day," he says, "and I'm an engineer."
Appropriately enough, Saffari's own company decided to do something about that. C-Cube's DoMiNo media processor is a single-chip, programmable, multi-stream, multi-format audio/video coder-decoder (codec). This little powerhouse IC is designed to bridge analog and digital, as well as various formats, allowing communication among all those disparate products. Furthermore, with a tremendous amount of processing power, it could conceivably form the heart of a single system that combines many boxes into the same package. Imagine a single unit that combines the functionality of a TV, a set-top box, a personal video recorder (PVR) and a gateway box so that this entertainment unit would also serve as a in-the-home networking hub - a "media server" connecting your entertainment center to your computers and anything else in the home that could be networked.
DoMiNo has the processing power to accomplish that, should anyone care to do so - C-Cube believes something such as that is inevitable, if not immediately forthcoming.
Saffari pointed to ReplayTV licensing its PVR technology to set-top box makers and Toshiba's new DVD players that incorporate hard drives.
"Boxes get integrated," he says.
DoMiNo is, in fact, powerful enough to be used in professional-level HDTV editing applications, another of C-Cube's target markets. Meanwhile, as a single-chip solution, DoMiNo should be inexpensive enough to be used widely in almost any electronics product that might ever need to be connected to another, such as feature-rich, interactive digital set-top boxes and DVD recorders, home media gateways, home media servers and video network headends with multi-stream transcoding and transrating capabilities.
C-Cube's DoMiNo network media processor integrates functions that previously would have been spread among 12 or so separate ICs (with integration being one of the means to achieving lower costs).
The chip integrates dual 150MIPS RISC processors, an audio DSP, a flexible video and motion estimation processor, DRAM controller, cache and scratch pad memory, IEEE1394 Link, transport stream demultiplexers, video and audio I/O, a flexible system bus and all necessary system I/O, including smart card interfaces.
The dual RISC core provides the necessary horsepower to implement additional graphics and host functions. The graphics capabilities include 2D rendering, 32-bit RGBA with 8-bit alpha blending, 4 graphics planes including OSD, flicker filter for web browser and character-based applications, and video scaler for letterbox conversions.
The upshot is support for a high level of video quality, the ability to decode up to four video streams at the same time (which enables picture-in-picture, for example) or decode one stream while encoding another, support of HDTV and MPEG 4 for videostreaming, the ability to transcode and translate audio and video data from one format to another, and support for encryption standards, such as CPPM, CPRM, CSS, Multi-2, DES and 5C.
Siemens Information and Communication Networks has allied itself with ADC and Harmonic. With equipment from these partners, Siemens can offer virtually an end-to-end system configuration to upgrade existing cable networks into interactive broadband networks capable of providing faster Internet access, voice-over-IP and interactive TV.
For its multimedia platform, Siemens will offer cable modem termination systems (CMTS) from ADC in its IP access platform for hybrid fiber coax (HFC) networks. ADC will be Siemens' preferred supplier for such CMTS equipment around the world. Harmonic is Siemens' preferred supplier of cable access optical networking equipment used for broadband cable transmission in key markets around the world.
Siemens can also supply customer premises equipment (cable modems, set-top boxes) as well as network infrastructure (optical systems, amplifiers, etc.) and network access technology such as edge routing systems and IP Gateways.
While U.S. cable companies are well along in such upgrades, Siemens, Harmonic and ADC see an opportunity in Europe. The broadband cable network in Germany is a pure broadcast or point-to-multipoint network, and the partners expect it will be upgraded to a highly flexible, broadband multimedia network.
Over the next three to five years, the upgrade is projected to require billions of Euro investment to upgrade the sub-networks with modern HFC and IP technology. In Germany alone, it demands an estimated investment of Euro $15 to 20 billion.
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