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To: Peter V who wrote (42215)	6/16/1999 12:39:00 PM
From: DiViT	Respond to of 50808

Chinese team demos set-top design By Sunray Liu EE Times (06/16/99, 12:19 p.m. EDT) eet.com BEIJING — As U.S. companies target the emerging Chinese market for information appliances, design houses in China are gearing up to challenge them. A case in point is Shenzhen CKD Tech. Co. Ltd., which employs more than 40 local engineers as well as several engineers with experience in Silicon Valley. The Chinese design house's focus is on generating system designs around audio/video, Internet, smart-card and other applications, then selling them to OEMs. "I posted a story about video-CD players plus Internet almost two years ago, and [in it] I predicted that [info appliances were] coming," said Zhengchang Jiang, CKD's general manager. "We almost had finished the third-generation design of [an appliance] before Microsoft announced its Venus plan." CKD demonstrated an Internet set-top, Internet Super VCD and video PC to China's Ministry of Information Industry and company officials in late April. The Internet set-top includes a 64-bit RISC processor and a single-chip DSP modem capable of supporting 56 kbits/second transmissions. CKD system software supports popular browsers used here along with e-mail, language and personalizing protocols and functions for the Internet and basic e-commerce applications. The set-top system uses the PAL or NTSC TV formats to display information, employs a wireless keyboard and provides a connection for external storage and printing. The company expects to begin volume production soon and will sell the system for about $100. CKD next plans to move its set-top box board into an SVCD design to launch a full-blown info appliance design. The system would provide users with Internet access and play SVCD and older VCD disks. By adding an X86 embedded CPU to its SVCD design, CKD also plans to launch a video-PC design that uses a Windows-compatible DOS operating system and interface. The $180 system uses a TV for a monitor and will be designed to run game and education software as well as word-processing and personal-management functions.