View as PDF

Do you need a tangible example of the power of Moore’s Law-fueled semiconductor-single-chip integration? Try removing the top from a decade-old piece of consumer-electronics gear. This particular Prying Eyes patient is ReplayTV’s 4x00-series PVR (personal video recorder), a groundbreaking device of the time that was eventually retired by legal decree.

1. The processing heart of RTV4x00-series PVRs, a 250-MHz, MIPS-based, 32-bit PMC-Sierra CPU, ran the Wind River Systems VxWorks operating system and was hardware-paired with a Xilinx XC2S100E FPGA. According to a lawsuit that numerous TV networks filed in late 2001, the processor-plus-software implementation attacked the “fundamental economic underpinnings of free television and basic nonbroadcast services.” The networks protested that a “commercial-advance” feature sensed the black frames (which bracketed inline advertisements) in a recording and used them to optionally and automatically skip the commercials during playback.

2. This unit is the RTV4508, which contains an 80-Gbyte, 5400-rpm PATA (parallel advanced-technology- attachment)/100 3.5-in., dual-platter hard-disk drive. The RTV4508 is nearly identical to its RTV4080 predecessor, except for the addition of analog POTS (plain-old-telephone-system) dial-up capabilities, which ReplayTV implemented with Conexant’s CX20463 modem and CX20437 voice-codec ICs, to supplement the Ethernet port because residential LANs were then rare. Also, with the RTV4500 series, Sonicblue, competing with TiVo, lowered the base price to improve the units’ retail attractiveness. However, the company then required that consumers pay a $250 “lifetime-activation fee,” which effectively made the units just as expensive as their RTV4000-series precursors. An optional per-month subscription plan was also available.

3. The RTV4508 combines National Semiconductor’s DP83815 10/100-Mbps Ethernet MAC (media-access controller) and a Pulse Engineering PE-68515L transformer on a PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) add-in card. Ethernet connectivity prompted one of the key RTV4x00-series advancements that fueled the ire of the entertainment industry. The advancement was a “send-show” feature that allowed users to stream lossless digital copies of broadcasts to a similar ReplayTV unit within the same local network and to transfer shows to a similar ReplayTV unit on the local network, across the Internet, or to a PC (http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayTV). The broadband connection also allowed users to download program guides from ReplayTV’s servers.

4. The RTV4x00 series recorded one channel’s worth of incoming analog video, either from an NTSC (National Television System Committee) tuner or from composite or S-video inputs, to the hard drive in MPEG-2 video and MP2 audio formats. ReplayTV’s devices supported both time-shifted- and “live”-playback modes common to the PVR genre, thereby explaining the TeraLogic (later Oak Technology, then Zoran) TL850 digital-TV decoder and TL810 multitransport demultiplexer with HDD controller in the design, along with the Broadcom BCM7040 digital A/V encoder and multiplexer. Other relevant ICs include Analog Devices’ ADV7170 video encoder, Burr-Brown’s (now Texas Instruments’) PCM1725 two-channel audio D/A and PCM1801 A/D converters, NEC’s uPD78F0034 microcontroller, Philips Semiconductors’ (now NXP Semiconductors’) SAA7114 video decoder, Rohm’s BU4052BCF analog audio multiplexer/demultiplexer, and Sony Semiconductors’ CXA2064 audio decoder and multiplexer. Nowadays, most if not all of these disparate features are found integrated within a single semiconductor slab of silicon.