As HDTV in the United States and Europe gains traction, demand from consumer-electronics manufacturers for tuner and set-top-box chip sets is growing. Among the key suppliers to this industry is Broadcom. A number of leading television and set-top-box manufacturers, including Motorola ( www.motorola.com
), Echostar ( www.dishnetwork.com
), DirecTV ( www.directv.com
), Sony ( www.sony.com
), Pioneer ( www.pioneerelectronics.com
), Tivo ( www.tivo.com
), and Pace Micro Technology ( www.pacemicro.com
), use Broadcom chip sets.
The company's India development center has contributed to the design and development of several SOC (system-on-chip) designs for HDTV set-top boxes. According to Rajendra Kumar Khare, managing director of Broadcom India, his team was among the first to develop MPEG-2 HDTV decoders. "The India center has filed more than 130 US patents, many of them related to HDTV technologies," says Khare.
Meanwhile, MindTree Consulting (Bangalore) is designing a digital PVR (personal-video-recording) platform that can record and process HDTV and digital-TV streams. Because HDTV programming occupies a lot of disk space, the company is devising compression algorithms and building applications for electronic programming, detecting commercials, pausing, and resuming live video, says S Janakiraman, the company's president and chief executive officer for R&D services. The company is also creating combination devices that fuse a DVD player and a set-top box and is working on ultrawideband blocks that will enable wireless recording from an HDTV to a PVR device. MindTree plans to add support for BluRay-disk format in the PVR platform. "We are also working on devices that can convert from DVB-S to IP [Internet Protocol] for IPTV applications," says Janakiraman.
India's embedded-system-design leader, Wipro Technologies, has produced an HDTV receiver board for digital TV and rear-projection TV. An unnamed US manufacturer commissioned the company to design and develop a decoder board that would receive and decode the digital-broadcast signals and pass them on to a display board. Wipro created a multichip, multiboard architecture. Because the customer supplied the display board, the principal challenge was to implement a board-control protocol that provided comprehensive command and control semantics for multiboard communication. "We had to work with multiple peripheral-chip-set providers to integrate their reference technologies onto the production software-and ensure that they worked seamlessly," explains Narayan Shenoy, group head of the Consumer Electronics Group at Wipro Technologies.
Broadcom
, www.broadcom.com
.
MindTree Consulting
, www.mindtree.com
.
Wipro Technologies
, www.wipro.com
.