GI's settop box design still in flux...........
eet.com
QED may lose spot in GI's set-top
By Junko Yoshida
HORSHAM, PA. — Reversing a statement made public in March, General
Instrument Corp. has acknowledged that Quantum Effect Design Inc.
(QED), a high-speed, high-performance MIPS RISC design house based in
Santa Clara, Calif., may be losing out on a huge design win for a key CPU
in millions of GI's advanced interactive digital cable set-top boxes.
The possible switch on the CPU supplier for GI's digital set-top suggests
continuing behind-the-scenes wrangling for design wins among major
component suppliers, while the leading cable set-top vendor struggles to
shave every penny off its new system in order to keep the interest of cable
operators.
GI claims that 12 leading North American cable-system operators have
already ordered 15 million of its digital cable boxes, making the design win
for this key CPU an important one for the eventual winner.
"We are committed to the MIPS-based CPU architecture," said Denton
Kanouff, GI's vice president of marketing for digital network systems.
"Because there are multiple MIPS RISC CPU suppliers out there, we don't
have to get locked in with any one particular vendor until we place the final
order in the fourth quarter of this year."
Kanouff's statement, however, contradicts GI's own announcement made
on March 25, in which it listed QED's component as "the microprocessor of
choice" for the company's upcoming DCT-5000 advanced digital interactive
cable set-top.
Kanouff confirmed this week that GI is currently evaluating "NEC, QED
and a few other MIPS CPU vendors" as the possible key supplier for the
first production version of the DCT-5000. "This is a very competitive
business. Nothing has been decided yet," he said. "We're conducting
ongoing evaluations over features, pricing and availability among different
vendors' MIPS products."
An industry source close to GI's set-top designs, speaking on the condition
of anonymity, noted that, to QED's loss, NEC recently won the battle for
GI's DCT-5000 set-top box. Although Kanouff declined to confirm that
NEC is now the vendor of choice, GI has apparently begun distancing itself
from QED, and is no longer calling the Santa Clara-based company its
chosen CPU partner.
Meanwhile, QED would neither deny nor confirm the latest development.
Rick Kepple, vice president of marketing at QED, said that the only public
statement that's available today regarding QED's involvement in the
DTC-5000 set-top is GI's March press announcement. Asked if their
relationship with GI has changed since then, Keppler said, "that's a private
discussion between the two companies. There is nothing we can publicly
disclose today."
In a previous interview with EE Times in March, Kepple said that QED's
RM5230, to be designed into GI's DCT-5000, is a 64-bit MIPS
microprocessor with a 32-bit system bus interface, made to provide
workstation-class performance at an affordable price for consumer
applications. It will offer "soft modem functionality and
voice-over-telephony technology, in addition to a wide range of graphics
capability," Kepple said.
According to GI's Kanouff, the set-top vendor is looking for a MIPS CPU
with a processing power that matches or exceeds that of QED's proposed
MIPS microprocessor. QED's MIPS RM5230 is a 233-MIPS processor
running at 175 MHz. The DCT-5000's CPU must be able to run real-time
operating systems, and be capable of handling simultaneous real-time
interactive streams such as IP telephony and Web browsing, in addition to
digital cable broadcast, Kanouff said. "Technologies are changing so fast
these days. We are looking for a pretty powerful, high-speed MIPS CPU,
which has more Mips power left free for processing for a variety of
software applications."
Meanwhile, NEC declined to comment on the GI design-win issue. An
NEC spokeswoman said, "We can't either confirm or deny it, until we make
a public announcement."
Neither QED nor GI would say whether cost had become the major factor,
prompting GI to start looking around for other MIPS CPU options, such as
NEC's.
Previously, however QED's Kepple claimed that through manufacturing
agreements with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and IBM, QED
has made a successful transition from design house to a fully established
fabless semiconductor company. QED now has the capability to turn
around high-performance MIPs processors for the consumer market that
are still very cost-effective, he said.
Kaunouff predicted that GI is most likely to announce the company's final
decision on a CPU vendor for the DCT-5000 just before the Western
Cable Show scheduled in December. The company already has a
DCT-5000 development platform up and running and available for software
developers, but it will not have the first production version of the
DCT-5000 box until the beginning of 1999. GI will start shipping the
DCT-5000 in the second quarter of 1999.
Other major chips that go inside the DCT-5000 box include a single-chip
MPEG-2/Dolby digital decoder IC designed by GI and Broadcom; a
derivative of ATI Technologies' Rage PRO 2D/3D/Video graphics
accelerator; and Broadcom's most recently announced single-chip DOCSIS
version 1.0-compliant cable modem solution, called BCM3300.
Some of the 15 million units of digital cable boxes GI claims to have
received a commitment for will be DCT-1000s and DCT-2000s. These are
much simpler video-on-demand digital set-tops that do not include a cable
modem or the IP telephony capabilities required by the DCT-5000. "The
mix of DCT-1000, -2000 and -5000 [boxes] has to be determined by each
cable operator. We don't know what the breakdown is going to be at this
point," said Kanouff.
Meanwhile, GI plans to add new versions of the DCT-5000 over the year.
One of them will be a version capable of HDTV decoding, slated for launch
towards the end of 1999, said Kanouff. |
