Add-in cards could let PCs tune in digital TV next year
(Lots of companies mentioned here. It will be enlightening to see what CUBE offers for this market. Click on link for block diagram)
By Anthony Cataldo
EE Times
(11/03/98, 3:16 p.m. EDT)
SEOUL, South Korea — LG Semicon Co. Ltd. will roll out a chip
set at Comdex this month that it hopes will be used to bring digital
TV to next year's personal computers. Though new to the market,
LG and other chip makers are betting that DTV will provide a
sorely needed new application to drive PC sales in 1999.
Taking advantage of more-advanced process technologies, LG is
spinning out more highly integrated devices that will show up in
front-end receiver cards and DTV decoder cards that can handle
progressive-scan CRT output capabilities and talk to a separate
graphics card using an emerging communications port.
LG hopes ATI Technologies Inc. (Thornhill, Ontario), Intel Corp.
(Santa Clara, Calif.) and STB Systems Inc. (Richardson, Texas)
will be among those using its decoder chips in PC add-in cards.
Such a solution requires new algorithms to convert from an
interlaced to a progressive scan format, plus a new
decoder-to-graphics chip interface standard. Hardware decoding,
however, may face resistance from Intel, which is pushing its
software-only decoding proposal as the lowest-cost solution for
DTV-enabled PCs.
"LG will be very active in this segment," said Jim Hopkins, vice
president of strategic marketing for STB, which makes graphics
cards for Dell, Gateway, IBM and Compaq, among others. STB is
testing two chip sets, including the LG parts, for DTV add-in cards,
he said.
Intel is working with Zenith and LG Semicon, whose parent LG
Electronics owns a majority stake in Zenith, to define a reference
design to handle the 18 incoming DTV signals specified by the
Advanced Television System Committee. The card is based on a
vestigal sideband (VSB) receiver device from LG dubbed the
GDC21D003, said Jong-Soo Lee, assistant manager of LG's
digital-TV chip set marketing group.
Based on 0.35-micron technology, the chip combines a channel
decoder, a channel equalizer and an analog-to-digital converter,
functions that were previously offered as discrete devices. The card
receives data via an external intermediate-frequency demodulator
chip from Sanyo, which takes the incoming signal from a tuner
supplied by Alps, Sharp or Matsushita. After the signal has been
processed by the receiver card, the data is sent to either a TV or
PC for decoding.
LG, now sampling the device for $50, will begin volume production
in a month or two. Lee expects the first add-in receiver cards
based on the device to be ready by the first half of 1999.
ATI Technologies and STB will be early adopters of the device for
their graphics cards, Lee said. "We don't work directly with PC
companies, but instead we're working with ATI and STB to
provide the cards to [them]."
One of the technical challenges to be tackled by card vendors is the
conversion of the interlaced format into a progressive-scan format
used in PC monitors. Currently, the MPEG-2 decoder hardware
from LG isn't capable of making the format conversion, so
graphics-card companies are developing their own algorithms to
perform de-interlacing in software, Lee said.
"We support interlaced scan on the card, but it can be converted to
progressive scan so you can use any monitor with progressive
scanning," he said.
The decoder, now being debugged, has a transport-stream parser
that lets it interface to a VSB card, output controller and Video
Interface Port (VIP 2.0).
Ratified by the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA)
last November, VIP defines an interface between graphics devices
and video chips like DVD, HDTV, (high definition TV) and video
decoders. It has won the support of Microsoft and Intel in the PC
9x specification and been adopted by graphics-chip companies like
3Dfx, NVidia and apparently ATI.
The 2.0 will support dual video streams with programmable
direction, enabling new video apps. The standard should be ratified
by year's end, VESA said.
PC manufacturers will have to see whether their customers prefer
hardware or software-based decoding. Intel, for one, has made no
secret of its wish to forgo use of an MPEG decoder altogether and
use an All-Format Decoder (AFD) algorithm on a Pentium-II
processor to accommodate all video formats approved by the
Advanced Television System Committee.
LG is also preparing to field new silicon for consumer digital TVs.
By the end of this year, the company will begin to sell samples of its
GDC21S801 standard-definition television (SDTV) decoder chip,
which will complement its three-piece chip set for high-definition
TV that it introduced last year. By the second half of 1999, the
company expects to start sampling its high-definition TV decoder
device, the GDC21D801. That chip will combine all of the
functions of its current HDTV chip set into one device, Lee said.
The high cost for HDTVs will create an interim market for SDTV,
Lee said. "The HDTV market is not mature, and at this stage we
think we'll need an SDTV solution first," he said.
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