Broadband Week for November 29, 1999
Chip Developers Tune In To PC Digital Broadcasts
By BILL MENEZES November 29, 1999
Forget about the TV set: Chip-makers expect the digital-broadcasting migration to hit the personal computer first and fastest.
In recent weeks, silicon vendors have detailed a variety of new products and development plans aimed at creating low-cost, mass-market solutions for making digital-TV broadcasts and datacasts accessible by PC.
At the Comdex convention in Las Vegas earlier this month, Conexant Systems Inc. demonstrated its "DStreamATSC" single-card reference platform, which it said supports a high-definition TV tuner/decoder PC card at the $150 retail price point considered key to mass-market acceptance.
Also, digital-TV semiconductor and software producer SkyTune Corp. announced a strategic alliance with Sarnoff Corp. to develop products aimed at integrating low-cost digital-TV and datacasting-reception capabilities into PCs and information appliances.
At Comdex, SkyTune also demonstrated its "SKYDTV99" PCI (peripheral component interconnect) reference design, which it called its first sub-$100 reference design for PC digital-TV receivers.
"This takes advantage of the impending ubiquity of the PC architecture," SkyTune vice president of sales and marketing Mike Noonen said. "That's not the same as saying the PC is going to be everywhere. But PC pieces are finding their way into virtually everyplace where digital programming finds its way."
The digital-television market has been slow to emerge, partly because of the chicken-and-egg hurdles of high digital-capable TV-set prices in the $5,000 range that have hampered mass-market penetration. Plus, there has been a relative lack of digital-TV programming, which analysts said will remain the case until the installed base grows.
But chip developers are buoyed by market projections that the huge existing base of PCs will translate into big demand for add-in cards that will tune and receive digital-TV programming or datacasting, either through PCI or 1394 "fire-wire" interfaces.
Cahners In-Stat, a sister company to Multichannel News, forecast that digital-TV tuner/demodulator cards for PCs will account for 27.5 percent of all digital-TV tuners sold in the United States next year, versus the 18.9 percent share expected for TV sets. The PC figure rises to a peak of 32.4 percent in 2002.
The market could grow to 3 million digital-TV tuner cards sold in 2002, jumping to 20 million two years later, Cahners forecast.
By 2005, an estimated 80 percent of all multimedia personal computers sold to the consumer market will contain an Advanced Television Standards Committee-based tuner/demodulator capable of receiving digital-TV signals using the U.S. industry standard 8-vestigial-sideband modulation scheme, Cahners reported.
A key driver will be the availability of low-cost tuner cards, which will be added to the "bullet list" of available PC features by original-equipment manufacturers such as Dell Computer Corp. and Compaq Computer Corp. The cards will join internal modems and sound cards as standard PC elements.
"We believe that this bullet-list phenomenon is likely to occur with 8-VSB tuners for the U.S. market, especially since Microsoft [Corp.] and Intel [Corp.] are 'force-feeding' data capabilities to the terrestrial-broadcast industry," Cahners forecast.
"This market will experience the highest early unit shipments, because the price point of an ATSC 8-VSB tuner/demod as an add-in card for a personal computer will be below $300 at retail in 2000 and below $199 at retail in 2001," Cahners added.
Silicon developers such as Conexant and SkyTune believe they can already reach that price point, and they said computer makers believe the market already exists.
"There are several PC OEMs already shipping analog-TV cards as part of their build to order," said Eileen Carlson, Conexant's product-line manager for broadcast products. "Time and time again, they're asking for the ability to offer digital."
Conexant's reference design is for a PCI card with a bill of material for hardware of about $70, meaning a PC OEM could retail the device for $149 and capture a large profit margin in the process.
The design -- intended for computers using Pentium III-class microprocessors -- incorporates Conexant's "Fusion 878A" PCI decoder with the "CineMaster" HDTV-software MPEG-2 all-format decoder by Ravisent Technologies Inc., which enables decoding and playback of all digital-TV formats specified by the ATSC, including high-definition TV.
Carlson said this includes the 720-progressive format delivering 60 frames per second and the 1080-interlaced format at 30 frames per second.
The digital-TV signal received by the TV tuner is demodulated and sent to the Fusion decoder at 2 megabits per second. Then it is processed and sent via the PCI bus, where it is decoded by the CineMaster software into respective audio and video streams that can be handled by standard VGA and sound cards.
"Now we've hit processor speeds that are sufficient," Carlson said, noting the proliferation of midrange PCs sporting CPU speeds in the 500-megahertz to 600-MHz range. "And if people are buying a midrange machine, they're getting a 17-inch monitor."
Reflecting the popularity of the PC card as a digital-TV vehicle, Ravisent said it is also working with Intel, Philips Consumer Electronics Co., NVIDIA Corp., ATI Technologies Inc. and SkyTune on products incorporating its decoder.
Conexant expects retail products using its design to hit the market in the first half of next year.
SkyTune expects the initial device from its collaboration with Sarnoff -- the "SKY 5201" digital-TV receivers for PCs -- to be available as engineering samples by mid-2000.
Noonen said that by targeting the PC architecture, SkyTune wanted to help foster the development of datacasting that adds value for terrestrial digital-TV broadcasters by giving viewers access to data that can be scaled significantly higher than the streaming audio and video not available on the Internet.
The PC is a better platform than the TV, he added, because it has greater processing power and memory than digital-TV set-top boxes and the added functionality of a huge disk drive, creating the platform for additional future features such as personal video recording -- the so-called digital VCR features.
"The potential high-definition-receiver customers are already being served by cable and DBS [direct-broadcast satellite]," Noonen said. "So from a broadcaster's viewpoint, the best way to make use of terrestrial DTV is to broadcast IP [Internet protocol] data on a much larger scale than the Internet public is being served now."
SkyTune's reference design for a sub-$100 DTV receiver card is based on its "SKY951VP" chip, introduced earlier this year, and Oren Semiconductor Inc.'s "OR51210" VSB demodulator.
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Note: LGE will earn a royalty on every PC sold with the VSB cards, thanks to Zenith's engineers. |
