PowerTV ASIC targets set-top boxes

Electronic News, Oct 2, 1995

Scientific-Atlanta's PowerTV subsidiary is targeting OEMs developing set-top terminals with a new multimedia ASIC that the company is licensing in conjunction with its operating system.

The ASIC, called Eagle, will initially be used by Scientific-Atlanta in its digital set-top terminals. The CPU bus has configurations supporting the IBM PPC403 and Motorola MPC505 processors.

The ASIC will be sampling in small quantities to OEMs in Q4. Pricing is expected to be under $30 in 10,000-unit quantities. The 5-volt part is manufactured in a 0.6-micron CMOS process.

According to PowerTV, the ASIC was developed internally. The device features graphics acceleration, audio mixing, scaling and compositing. At one time, Scientific-Atlanta had announced plans to use the "Malibu" multimedia graphics chip being developed by Kaleida Labs, the company co-owned by Apple and IBM. However, Kaleida abandoned its Malibu project while also terminating its effort to develop an operating system for set-top boxes last year (EN, May 16, 1994).

The Eagle ASIC, which uses standard or EDO DRAM up to 2MB, is said to provide graphics display and manipulation, compositing of graphics with video, and scaling of digitized motion video such as MPEG. It supports for both square pixels and CCIR 601 pixel sampling.

However, the Eagle chip's graphics capabilities are optimized for use in television environments. The graphics display operates in a choice of two resolution modes and two color space modes.

The ASIC, available in a 208-pin plastic package, provides four types of alpha blending for graphics compositing and overlay, anti-flutter filter, and scaling of motion video to arbitrary sizes. Mixing of PCM audio with digitized audio is also supported.

"We believe that set-top OEMs are looking for the Eagle chip's unique combination of TV-oriented multimedia acceleration, a glue-less component interface to reduce system costs and the integration we offer with the PowerTV OS," said Sandy MacInnis, vice president of hardware development at PowerTV.

PowerTV, meanwhile, also has formally released Version 1.0 of its operating system. The OS features a 32-bit architecture and multi-threaded kernel optimized for RISC processors.

The OS can reside in under 512KB of ROM, with upgrades possible through support for flash memory, the company said. The PowerTV OS uses standard TCP/IP protocols for interactive TV network signaling and application networking.

Other features include PowerDraw, a 2D imaging system; polyphonic PCM audio support and MPEG II transport system interface. Vendors supporting the OS include Oracle, Scala, and Sybase.