Toshiba explores new dynamics of TV market
By Ron Wilson, Executive Editor -- EDN, April 4, 2006
San Jose—Herded forward by the loom of an FCC mandate, television manufacturers globally are preparing digital-ready TV sets for the U.S. market. Even non-players looking for new markets, including giants like Hewlett Packard and Dell, are reportedly lining up Original Device Manufacturer (ODM) relationships in Asia to have products ready for the expected North American feeding frenzy.
But this new market is putting semiconductor manufacturers in a very unique situation, according to sources at Toshiba America Electronics Corp. The company, which has an established line of digital video SoCs in the set-top box market, is retargeting its IP as a new line of ASSP chips intended specifically for television manufacturers. But they are running head-on into some unusual questions—just what is a TV manufacturer, and to whom should Toshiba be selling?
“We end up selling to three different customers at once,” lamented Shardul Kazi, vice president of the Embedded Processor SoC business unit at TAEC. Kazi explained that the ultimate branding company—say Dell—has no internal design capability for television sets at all. Dell simply identifies an ODM who will contract to provide the sets to Dell’s specifications.
But the Asian ODMs also, for the most part, have no internal design capability. They require a reference design, down to the level of board film in the correct form factor for their enclosure, operating systems and middleware, applications and hooks to permit the design to adapt to their particular requirements. Further, the ODMs often contract with systems integrators for assembly and test, and these houses have their own parts, tooling and process requirements. So Toshiba must simultaneously meet Dell’s specs, the ODM’s needs and the integrator’s requirements.
The result is not only a complex, multinational and multicultural selling cycle. It has substantial implications for the chip architecture, as well. ODMs will require that a reference design be tested, wrung out and fully ready to manufacture. A traditional reference design that is simply a guideline on how to use the chip wouldn’t come close to meeting the ODM’s needs.
But in addition, the ODM will demand industry-proven performance in key areas of the chip that will impact the appearance of the image on the screen. These areas include MPEG motion compensation and error correction, both of which are sources of notorious artifacts in many current digital TV sets. ODMs want to see a track record, and they want to run their own favorite bit streams through the reference design—including some streams that may be archaic or non-standard. Further, the ODMs will require that the reference design be flexible enough to adapt to passive component, form factor and display panel choices that may be altered during manufacture based on supply chain issues.
All these factors point to a dilemma: the MPEG and video processing algorithms must be sophisticated and powerful. But the engines must be sufficiently programmable to permit rapid variations in decoding algorithms, user controls, remote-control interfaces and on-screen user interfaces.
Toshiba’s solution has been a combination of a 64-bit MIPS core and three instances—each slightly differently configured—of an internal configurable DSP IP core. This provides sufficient processing power and application specificity to keep the key algorithms in software but achieve a reasonable power consumption and adequate performance.
If only the sales cycle could be solved that easily.
