DVD & Blu-ray Disc Players & Recorders

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

Serving Many Functions in DVD and Blu-ray Disc Players and Recorders

DVD and Blu-ray Disc players and recorders require extensive digital signal processing - and Tensilica's dataplane processors are right in there, doing the heavy DSP processing. Just look at the things that need to be engineered in a Blu-ray Disc Player:

Architectural Considerations

You can find Tensilica's dataplane processors performing the following tasks:

Audio Processing

All of the mandatory and optional multi-channel codecs for Blu-ray Disc, including Dolby and DTS, can be run on a single HiFi 2 Audio DSP, saving valuable power and real estate over using multiple DSPs. This also greatly simplifies system design. \'Here\'s offered for Tensilica's HiFi 2 Audio Engine.

Video and Image Processing and Graphics

Tensilica's cores are used in two ways in the video and image processing electronics in Blu-ray Disc Players:

1. Xtensa processors are used for HD video stream processing as well as video post processing for functional blocks such as scalars, de-interlacers, image filters, etc.
2. Xtensa processors are used for embedded control in the video processing blocks.

Security / DRM

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. Digital Right Management (DRM) features embedded within commercially distributed music and video require complex decryption. Tensilica's Xtensa processors are ideal for a programmable solution so that, as standards change, you don't need to respin the chip.

Radios

Home entertainment products such as Blu-ray players are increasingly integrating personal area networking functionality to enable wireless media sharing. Tensilica's processors and DSPs are key building blocks for implementing radios such as WiFi, WiMedia, UWB, and Wireless HD.

Deeply Embedded Processors

Each subsystem often requires an embedded processor. Why not stay with Tensilica, and use either Diamond Standard or Xtensa processors to do the subsystem control?

Main Application CPU

Blu-ray player systems are new territory, without a long history of legacy code requirements to drive the choice of main application CPU. That leaves designers free to choose an applications CPU with the best performance - cost - power - optimization.

Tensilica's Diamond Standard or Xtensa processors are ideal as the main application CPU, controlling all of the subsystems in the player. They're very power efficient and fully programmable in C, even when you decide to customize the processor. And we have the operating system support you might need including open-source embedded Linux for this complex application.