Global Designer: Digital TV comes with "India inside"

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.