Matsushita readies single-chip set-top solution
By Yoshiko Hara
EE Times
(06/11/99, 4:26 p.m. EDT)
TOKYO — In a bid to enter the chip market for set-top boxes, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. will introduce a single-chip solution that can be programmed to decode all standard-definition 480i and 480p formats used around the world for digital TV broadcasts. The company hopes to capture 20 percent of the silicon set-top market by 2000.
Matsushita engineers have integrated all functionality of a set-top box into the device, excluding the front-end, RF receiving section. The chip includes two processing engines: Matsushita's proprietary AM33 32-bit RISC processor; and the company's Media Core processor, which was developed for audio/video data processing.
"Despite the fact that TV receivers have more and more functions, their prices have been eroding to the point that TV set manufacturers cannot make a profit in Japan," said Kazumi Kawashima, director of the CE System LSI Development Center of Matsushita. "In a few years, the same phenomenon will be seen in overseas markets as well. A one-chip solution has really come into demand."
The new chip will replace Matsushita's previous five-piece chip set, which the company used for a set-top board. With the monolithic solution, the board space required for the circuitry will be reduced by 60 percent, according to Matsushita. Though Kawashima did not give a concrete figure about product cost reduction, he implied that the price of a chip in general could be one fifth if it integrates five chips.
The device has 10 million transistors and achieves 5 giga operation per second, or 121 Mips performance with power consumption of 2.6 watts. The chip includes cross-bus switches to achieve about 3.5 times better performance compared to a single-bus-structure device, said Yoshio Abe, general manager of Development Group-2 at Matsushita CE System LSI Development Center. The cross-bus structure eliminates bottlenecks caused when signals are waiting for the bus clears, which are peculiar to a single-bus structure. Hence, the data-transfer rate is about 800 Mbits/second, or about four times faster than conventional designs, he said. The chip is fabricated on a 0.25-micron CMOS process and comes in 441-pin BGA package.
Though Matsushita allied with Microsoft Corp. last July to employ Windows CE for set-top products, the company's latest set-top chip uses PieOS, Matsushita's proprietary real-time OS. Matsushita intends to continue using PieOS for TV receivers with basic functions and to use Windows CE for products that feature interactive functions.
The new device is intended for standard-definition TV signal decoding. "To decode high-definition broadcasting, another HD decoding chip is necessary for [use with] this chip," said Teiji Nishizawa, general manager of the System Architecture Group at Matsushita. "We are going to offer an HD-ready chip fabricated on a 0.18-micron process next year, timed with the start of BS [broadcast satellite] digital broadcasting." Trial digital broadcasting is scheduled to begin in autumn in Japan.
Matsushita will begin sampling the device this month for about $67, and will begin volume production simultaneously. Production capacity will begin at 50,000 pieces per month, and increase to 100,000 per month later this year.
"Matsushita projects that the STB market will be 15 million units this year and 20 million units next year," Kawashima said. "Next year, we expect to get about a 20 percent share in the LSI market for set-top boxes."
The chip market for set-tops has already been split by influential foreign suppliers such as STMicroelectronics, C-Cube and ATI Technologies. "The market leaves a small chance for a Japanese consumer electronics giant to enter," said Michito Kimura, an analyst at IDC Japan Ltd.
"Matsushita is probably going to target BSkyB STBs in the United Kingdom, but STMicroelectronics has established its position in this field," Kimura said. "Major STB suppliers have already formed ties with chip vendors. It should be very difficult to enter from now, especially in the United States."
Matsushita has decided to use the chip for its own TV products. Satoru Rick Oyama, senior analyst at ABN Amro Securities (Japan) Ltd., said, "whether Matsushita can achieve a 20 percent share or not will depend on how large a share the company intends to have in the digital-TV set market. It will be difficult for Matsushita to sell the part to third-party STB vendors."
Japanese chip companies are still a small presence in the set-top market. NEC Corp. began sampling a system-on-chip design for set-tops last June, and started shipping the part to set-top vendors in Europe this past March. But the companies shipments are still falling short of its original plan. The company had predicted volume production of 200,000 units a month starting in January of this year. But at present the company is supplying 30,000 to 40,000 units a month to its clients, according to an NEC spokesman. NEC will begin shipping the part to customers outside of Europe this autumn, and NEC plans for production of 150,000 to 200,000 units/month at that time.
NEC is aiming to capture a 30 percent share of the market by 2001, when the STB market is projected to grow to 30 million units worldwide, according to NEC.
Meanwhile, Hitachi Ltd. formed an alliance with STMicroelectronics in December 1997 to jointly development a version of Hitachi's SH-5 processor and to license the SH architecture to ST. Hitachi hasn't yet developed a one-chip STB solution, but STMicroelectronics will use the SH-4 architecture for its next-generation STB chip.
"We expect that if STMicroelectronics' share in STB LSI market grows, SH-4 architecture will grow," a Hitachi spokesman said. "We are preparing a chip using SH-4 or SH-5 to decode HD signals." |
