Here's one with a big PE, and they only are after settop boxes. So far they dominate Cable modems. They don't have an MPEG-2 chip yet, but they just came out with a graphics chip that incorporates an NTSC/PAL video encoder. You don't need an NTSC/PAL encoder, if your using AViA, it's already built-in. The same team that built the Eagle chip for the Pegasus project......................................
eet.com
Broadcom plans set-top silicon sweep
By Junko Yoshida
EE Times
(11/09/98, 5:42 p.m. EDT)
IRVINE, Calif. — Broadcom Corp., a leading developer of high-speed broadband communication chips, is entering the graphics controller market with a newly developed 2-D/3-D graphics accelerator tailored for TV.
The move represents Broadcom's ambitious plan to dominate the cable set-top market as a full-fledged supplier of every key piece of silicon that must go into a set-top. Those key chips range from cable-modem chip sets fully compliant with the cable industry-specified Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (Docsis) version 1.0, to an MPEG-2 video/Dolby Digital audio decoder IC, and a newly introduced 2-D/3-D graphics controller that's fully integrated with a video display engine, NTSC analog decoder and NTSC video encoder.
“This is one of the most highly integrated graphics chips in the industry, specifically designed for TV set-tops and optimized for the cost of a set-top,” said Rich Nelson, director of cable-TV marketing at Broadcom.
The new chip is squarely positioned to grant the growing wish of U.S. cable operators to go beyond broadcasting regular cable-TV programs, and offer such advanced services as Internet, e-mail and sophisticated program guides to the home. Many cable operators, with a two-way cable infrastructure, are jockeying “to become a portal for Web pages, advertising, program guide and other interactive services,” said Nelson. “Cable operators realize now that they can sell these services if they look good.”
Broadcom's new graphics team of designers, now established in San Jose, set a special goal for the new chip: it must be able to provide “studio-quality text, graphics and video on TV displays,” said Nelson.
Dubbed the BCM7014, the chip comes with a 2-D/3-D graphics engine based on a R3000 RISC core, integrated with an NTSC analog decoder with a 10-bit A/D converter, adaptive comb filtering and time-based correction. The chip also includes an NTSC/PAL video encoder with Macrovision, which offers composite and S-Video analog outputs. An audio PCM engine is also incorporated into the chip so that it can do sample rate conversion, volume control and mix multiple audio streams. Nelson pointed out that the chip also integrates a Unified Memory Architecture memory controller for high CPU performance and memory cost savings.
The graphics engine on the BCM7014 is “not intended for high-end PC graphics, but rather it's a midrange engine designed for professional-quality 3-D interactive video special effects such as flips, peels, warps and rotations,” for scene changes or transitions from one program to another, the Broadcom executive said. “Cable operators who saw our demonstrations really liked those special effects.”
The chip performs video warping, texture-mapping Gouraud polygon shading, image blending, scaling and traditional blitting. However, Nelson stressed, “The target is not to turn the set-top into a games platform.”
The 3-D graphics engine, based on a variation of the R3000 core, is totally programmable, while it supports a variety of 3-D graphics and real-time imaging processing. Engineers at Broadcom, which is now a MIPS licensee, developed proprietary extensions to the MIPS RISC core specifically for graphics.
One of the key features of the BCM7014 is its 2-D graphics compositor, which is capable of creating “virtually an unlimited number of composite surfaces on the fly, and writing them directly to a screen, without using a frame buffer,” according to Steve Jeck, senior software engineer. Each graphics layer can have its own native pixel format and can be blended together independently on a per-surface and per-pixel basis. Because this requires no frame buffers, one can save “at least 1 Mbyte or more of memory,” said Nelson.
Broadcom made no secret of its ambition to unseat other chip vendors, when possible, in whichever set-tops are now being designed. Asked whether this 2-D/3-D graphics accelerator was intended to go into General Instruments' DCT-5000+ advanced digital set-top or other less-advanced models, Broadcom declined to comment. ATI recently announced that a derivative of the company's RAGE PRO 2-D/3-D video graphics accelerator received a design win in GI's DCT-5000.
GI's Nelson said, “ATI has always been on our radar screen.” He added, “The better solution always has a chance to win the market.”
The BCM7014, sampling now, is scheduled for volume production in Q1, 1999. The chip is priced at $21 in 100,000-piece quantities.
The device is fabricated at TSMC, using a 0.31 micron process. “We took a 0.35 micron process and did an optical shrink to it,” Nelson said.
Broadcom's new graphics chip was designed by a small graphics-chip team, formerly known as Auzron Systems, that Broadcom acquired last fall. Auzron was originally spun out of the interactive-TV platform company PowerTV Inc.
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