1998-11-10 , E/IC-1053/54
Product News From Philips Semiconductors

With the introduction of its STB5660 Second Generation  STB Concept at  Electronica '98, Philips Semiconductors, the largest European semiconductor manufacturer, has reduced the silicon cost of set-top boxes for Digital Media Broadcasting (DMB), while retaining the design flexibility to accommodate existing and future advanced interactive services. The STB5660 Reference Design kit significantly cuts development costs for set-top box manufacturers by offering them the world's first complete hardware and software reference design solution. By reducing the number of chips required, it also cuts manufacturing costs and printed circuit board size.

"By integrating the combined functionality of our existing 5-chip STB solution into just two highly integrated devices, one of which includes a powerful 32-bit MIPS processor core, we are leading the world in providing low-cost chip sets and complete system solutions for the next generation of high-performance digital set-top boxes," commented Rob Groen, International Product Manager for Philips Semiconductors' Consumer Systems division. "Our new chip set offers highly efficient use of DRAM for both MPEG decoding and graphics manipulation, and compared to our competitors, more advanced graphics capabilities."

The STB5660 Reference Design is a complete solution to digital satellite receiver set-top box design, comprising a fully loaded pc board based around Philips Semiconductors' new 2-chip STB solution, and a comprehensive set of software design tools. It can be easily adapted to receive digital cable or digital terrestrial broadcasts simply by adding the appropriate front-end tuner and demodulator. All the processing required to demultiplex and decode the selected video, audio and data channels from the demodulated signal, and to recreate an analog video signal that can be fed to a standard TV set, is then performed by Philips Semiconductors' two new highly integrated chips.

The  SAA7214 T-MIPS Transport MPEG Source Decoder descrambles the demodulated signal according to the European DVB Super Descrambler Mechanism algorithms, and then demultiplexes the signal to select out as many as 32 individual video, audio or data streams under the control of its embedded PR3001 32-bit MIPS processor. These streams are passed to the  SAA7215 AVG (Audio/Video/Graphics) Decoder, which in addition to decoding the MPEG audio and video channels and providing advanced on-screen graphics capabilities, also constructs analog CVBS (Composite Video Baseband Signal) and S-Video (Super-Video) outputs.

In conjunction with as little as 16 Mbits of external SDRAM, these two ICs therefore contain all the functionality and processing power required to descramble and decode DVB or DVD-Video inputs, to add sophisticated on-screen displays and programme selection guides, and to output a video signal that can be displayed on a standard analog TV set. The 32-bit embedded MIPS processor also has sufficient processing bandwidth to handle the interactive services that will be offered by DMB service providers, such as home shopping, video-on-demand and World-Wide Web access. Both the SAA7214 and SAA7215 have additional interfaces to create sophisticated multi-source, multi-output set-top boxes with DVD-compatible inputs,  IEEE-1394 (FireWire) outputs and smart-card reader capabilities.

"Using the STB5660 chip-set in their set-top boxes gives manufacturers and service providers another important advantage," said Rob. "It puts them firmly on a road map that will allow them to seamlessly migrate their designs to a single-chip solution that we already have in development as a test chip."

The software tools that are supplied with the STB5660 Reference Design include Philips Semiconductors' 3-layer STB software architecture. In addition to providing software drivers at the IC and system control levels, this architecture includes a sophisticated API (Application Program Interface) together with a range of fully tested application software modules. This frees designers to concentrate on developing highly featured and differentiated STB designs that can be easily modified to meet changing market requirements.

The complete STB5660 Reference Design kit sells for around US$ 20k.

Philips Semiconductors, a division of Royal Philips Electronics, headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, is the ninth largest semiconductor supplier in the world and the third largest supplier of discretes in the world. Philips Semiconductors' innovations in digital audio, video, and mobile technology position the company as a leader in the consumer, multimedia and wireless communications markets. Sales offices are located in all major markets around the world and are supported by systems labs.

For more information, see also BG9808: Philips Semiconductors' STB5660 set-top box concept