No segment of the electronics industry is immune to competition, but skirmishes in the consumer-electronics segment are arguably among the bloodiest. Scant per-unit profit margins are the norm, not the exception, and, therefore, manufacturers rely heavily on robust volume shipments as the path to fiscal triumph. The difference between a runaway success and a never-left-the-runway failure sometimes hinges on the slimmest of feature, price, and other differentiators, and potential customers’ notorious fickleness is no guarantee that what works today will continue to appeal for the next product generation or even for the next week.

Take CECBs (coupon-eligible converter boxes), for example. The intent of the US-government-funded CECB program is to ensure that individuals without access to alternative television services, such as cable, satellite, or IPTV (Internet Protocol television), and lacking the funds necessary to purchase a full-featured ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) set-top box or ATSC-supportive television can still access over-the-air, “free”—that is, advertising-supported—television. Access to such programming is arguably a citizen’s right and contributes to the common good by virtue of the broadcast of emergency alerts, government policy sessions, election debates, and the like.

CECBs whose retail price comes close to—or matches—the $40-per-coupon, at two coupons per request, government-rebate amount translate to a free or nearly free end-customer expense. Perhaps not surprisingly, those CECBs will likely constitute the lion’s share of all CECB sales. The $40 price needs to comprehend not only BOM (bill-of-materials), development, and manufacturing costs, but also shipping and warehousing expenses, along with distributor and retailer markups. With these criteria, there’s seemingly no opportunity for differentiation, but creative engineers and their marketing counterparts have nonetheless still managed to create a diverse product smorgasbord. How? Four products provide case-study examples.

The CECB program aims to provide continued broadcast-television reception for those who, for geographic or financial reasons, cannot access alternative TV services or purchase full-featured ATSC-cognizant gear. In developing the program, the US government strove to avoid excessively burdening the taxpayers who finance it (reference 1 and reference 2). According to the NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) program-managing organization, CECBs cannot offer high-definition video-output capabilities; this constraint disallows HDMI (high-definition-multimedia-interface), DisplayPort, DVI (digital-visual-interface), RGB, and component-video outputs. It even disallows the 480p (480-line progressive-scan) video mode, as well as digital audio or greater-than-two-channel analog-audio outputs. CECBs also cannot support encryption-free “clear QAM” (quadrature-amplitude modulation) for cable-television support. Simply stated, CECBs strictly convert ATSC to NTSC (National Television System Committee) for legacy-TV compatibility.

These stringent restrictions couple with equally stringent requirements, such as a host of broadcast-reception and decoded-video minimum-quality specifications that the NTIA tests before giving a product the CECB blessing. Units must be capable of both center-cropping and letterboxing a 16-by-9-aspect-ratio program for compatibility with 4-by-3-aspect-ratio displays. They must offer composite video and two-channel analog-audio outputs, as well as a merged audio-plus-video RF output (Reference 3). They must also include a dedicated remote control and offer compatibility with universal remotes. Bit-stream compatibility extends beyond basic MPEG-2 (Moving Picture Experts Group) video and Dolby Digital audio to additionally comprehend EAS (emergency-alert-system) messages, V-chip rating descriptors, and closed-captioning info, along with PSIP (Program and System Information Protocol) data. And CECBs must burn no more than 2W of power with audio and video outputs disabled, as well as support automatic power-down capabilities.

The differentiation-cultivating gap between what the converter must include and what it cannot include still ends up being broader than at first glance. Some companies choose to use higher-quality chassis-construction materials or make other cosmetic enhancements. Others bundle additional accessories beyond the minimum set that converter-box specifications dictate. Some vendors offer added hardware-delivered features, and others add capabilities through software.

And then there are those manufacturers that choose none of these differentiating paths; instead, they build a bare-bones set-top box that stays within the NTIA boundaries in all regards. Because there’s little to no marketing motivation to sell a CECB for less than $40, these companies end up with a wider-than-average disparity between BOM cost and price. By passing along some or all of this incremental profit to distributors and retailers, they cultivate a retail-shelf-space preference for their products, thereby creating consumer demand by squeezing competing alternatives off retail shelves. By happy accident, the four CECBs that this article analyzes exemplify all of these strategies.

The CECBs this article showcases came from the two coupons I requested for my home-office residence, along with two I obtained from a friend. I based my CECB selection on the devices’ cosmetic differences, in the hope, which panned out, that these dissimilarities would translate to fundamental design distinctions (Figure 1). From CompUSA, I first acquired Access HD’s DTA-1080D and Apex Digital’s DT502, each for 1 cent after rebate. The two boxes exemplify radically different product strategies; the DTA-1080D includes scant extras: a remote control and two batteries, a wall-wart external ac/dc converter, a slender sheath of paper documentation, and a short coaxial cable. The embedded-power-supply DT502 also comes with a composite video-plus-two-channel-analog-audio cable bundle. And, whereas the DTA-1080D is small, plastic, and conjoined by plastic clips, the larger DT502 offers sturdier metal sheets held together with screws (Table 1).

The other two set-top boxes are equally diverse in both design and decor. The free-after-rebate TR-40 CRA—a CECB you can get from Dish Network (as I did), EchoStar, or Sling Media—is reminiscent of the DTA-1080D in assembly—that is, plastic, albeit this time held together with metal screws—external power supply, and scant accessory apportionment. Although the metal-fabricated Sansonic FT-300A, which I obtained free after rebate from Meritline, doesn’t include a DT502-reminiscent analog audio/video cable, the company instead thoughtfully includes a flat Artec AN2 antenna. Like the Access HD and Dish Network units, Sansonic’s CECB also employs an external ac/dc converter, easing its use in vehicles, for example.

Considering my pleasure with the assembly and accessorizing diversity I discovered upon opening the four products’ packaging, you can imagine how much more thrilled I was when I popped off the set-top boxes’ chassis panels and encountered four different IC assemblages (Figure 2 and Table 2). Beginning with the tuner, the initial piece of silicon that the incoming ATSC signal encounters, I found that the Apex Digital DT502 and Dish Network TR-40 CRA employ traditional “can” tuner modules from Samsung and Thomson, respectively.

A brief glance at the Access HD DTA-1080D and Sansonic FT-300A might suggest that they’re also can candidates, but they aren’t. Both boxes use Microtune’s MT2131 silicon tuner, albeit in a can-compatible-subsystem form factor that suggests that manufacturing-time comparative price and availability assessments rather than an inherent silicon-tuner technical advantage drove the IC selection on the systems’ PCBs (printed-circuit boards).

The next two steps in the ATSC-processing chain are demodulation of the bit stream from its UHF or VHF carrier and decoding the audio, video, and other digital data. Two of the four CECBs, the Access HD DTA-1080D and the Apex Digital DT502, employ a single SoC for both tasks; respectively, Zoran’s SupraHD 741 and Realtek’s RTD2885. Not coincidentally, I suspect, these units were the only two set-top boxes I analyzed that incorporate cost-incurring passive heat sinks.

On the other end of the integration spectrum, Dish Network’s TR-40 CRA leverages an STMicroelectronics STV0373-demodulator and STi7707WUDP-decoder chip set. Sansonic’s FT-300A also uses separate ICs, but the demodulator companion to the Acer Laboratories M3601C decoder is not visible upon initial PCB inspection. Enthusiast-generated Internet documentation claims that the FT-300A employs Auvitek’s AU8515 demodulator; I suspect that it is alongside the Microtune MT2131 within the can enclosure that Sansonic’s manufacturing partner, Falcon Digital, designed (Reference 4).

The set-top boxes’ memory architectures also beg for some degree of discussion. They all use a single DDR-400 SDRAM with a 16-bit system interface, albeit in a diversity of densities and from a diversity of sources: Etron Technology’s 256-Mbit SDRAM (in the FT-300A), Hynix Semiconductor’s 512-Mbit SDRAM (in the TR-40 CRA), Nanya Technology’s 256-Mbit SDRAM (in the DT502), and Zentel Electronics’ 256-Mbit SDRAM (in the DTA-1080D). Three of the four CECBs employ eight-lead SOIC-packaged SPI (serial-peripheral-interface) flash memory for system code, in two cases from Spansion. The fourth CECB, Dish Network’s TR-40 CRA, instead uses a BGA-packaged parallel-interface burst-mode flash memory, also from Spansion.

Although all four STBs implement in-system-upgradable firmware potential, none of them offer a means of enabling consumers to do the upgrades themselves. Internet forums are therefore rife with posts from CECB owners attempting to discern units with latest and greatest firmware versions through product-code and manufacturing-location data, as well as from folks complaining about the need to ship CECBs back to manufacturers—at customer expense and with lengthy servicing delays—for updates to fix bugs and add features (see sidebar “But how well do they work?”).

The NTIA-defined gap between what features the box must include and what it can’t include might be slender, but it does exist. A glance at the CECBs’ back panels reveals the hardware-based augmentation that Apex Digital chose to include: a higher-quality, albeit still 480-line-interlaced S-video output, along with Smart Antenna array compatibility (Figure 3). And all four STBs support analog pass-through mode, enabling their owners to continue to receive signals from low-power stations and regional translator transmitters, neither of which are required to cease their NTSC broadcasts this year.

Software support can enable additional CECB capabilities, assuming that the system contains a sufficiently robust host CPU and adequate memory resources (Table 3). They include a variable-duration electronic program guide, digital closed-caption-decoding support, multilingual menus, viewer-reminder notifications of pending programs, and timer-based control of both system operating mode—standby or active—and the channel you are tuning in, so a VHS or DVD recorder, for example, can capture the CECB’s output.