See our white papers:
Everything You Wanted to Know About Blu-ray Audio, but were afraid to hear
A Designer’s Guide to HD Video Pre- and Post-Processing
When you're designing electronics for digital televisions, you can't design one chip for each model. Usually, one chip design is shared among huge families of models, and features are turned on and off by the host controller depending on the model features and price point. The more programmable the functional blocks, the more flexibility you have to design the chip into several models.
Most of the "heavy lifting" - the intensive data processing - is often done in hardwired blocks. But more and more ocmpanies are using Tensilica's dataplane processors to do these intensive tasks.
Here's a block-level representation of the digital functions found in a typical digital TV:
Tensilica's DSPs and cores are used for:
The number of audio software formats keeps growing. Tensilica's HiFi 2 Audio DSP has over 50 software codecs ported to it, from a very power-efficient MP3 decoder to full Blu-ray Disc compatible DTS and Dolby software. This way, you can use one HiFi 2 Audio processor to meet all of your audio requirements today and into the future.
Most other DSPs and RISC CPUs require two or more cores in order to handle the challenging decoding, re-encoding, and post-processing of audio for Blu-ray playback, but Tensilica can deliver a single-core DSP to handle this challenging workload, at a power level lower than any other competing solution. Find out more about \'Tensilica\'s.
Tensilica has a total SD video encode/decode solution to simplify your design efforts. Our 388VDO video processor is programmable and has the necessary codecs (H.264, etc.) to beautifully display broadcast video.
If you're designing for HDTV, Tensilica's Xtensa DSPs can be used for video stream processing as well as video post processing for blocks such as scalars, de-interlacers and image filters. And Xtensa processors can provide the 2D and 3D graphic support required to drive the TV menu system.
Tensilica's Xtensa DSPs are used in digital TV tuners to handle the computationally demanding tasks in the data plane - including the Viterbi and Reed-Solomon decoding, the deinterleaving, and the derandomization. Wherever there are data streams that need to be quickly processed, Tensilica's DSPs are perfect because the datapath can be matched exactly the incoming stream for the most efficient real-time processing. And a processor-based solution is ideal so you can design one chip for multiple standards for different regions in the world. That's why companies such as LG Electronics and NuFront have selected Tensilica for their mobile DTV and fixed DTV receiver chipsets.
Tensilica's processors can be used both in the PHY and the MAC layer processing. \'Tensilica\'s can be used for efficient turbocoding, OFDM filers, FFT, and Viterbi engines. Anywhere there's lots of data to be processed, Tensilica's DSPs can be efficiently employed to handle the data stream. And we have the operating system support you might need, including open-source embedded Linux, for these complex tasks.
It's essentail to implement complex security algorithms in a processor in case these algorithms needs to be changed. These algorithms are often used for encryption throughout the system, so engineers can't pirate copyrighted media and consumers can't access channels for which they haven't paid. Tensilica's Xtensa processors are ideal for a programmable solution so that, as standards change, you don't need to respin the chip.
Each subsystem often requires an embedded processor. Why not stay with Tensilica, and use either Xtensa processors to do the subsystem control.
If your system design does not have legacy code requirements, Tensilica's efficient Xtensa architecture is ideal as the main application processor as well, controlling all of the other subsystems in the DTV design. If you need operating system support, we have that as well.
