1999-09-13 , E/IC-1070/54
Product News From Philips Semiconductors

Philips SAA55xx family provides enhanced text and on-screen display

Philips Semiconductors today announced the SAA55xx family of TV microcontrollers, a cost-effective, truly global family for middle- and low-range analogue TV sets. The range offers ultra-fast lead times to the customer and features advanced user programmable graphics and text, normally only available on high-end sets.

"The new SAA55xx family re-invents the TV microcontroller," said Len Lloyd, Marketing Manager for Control/Text/OSD at Philips Semiconductors. "TV set manufacturers can now address world markets with a single basic chassis. By selecting different members of the SAA55xx family and exploiting their user programmable features, the manufacturer can create ranges of sets for specific markets. Hardware and software can be qualified with One Time Programmable (OTP) devices, reducing qualification lead-times to zero, and delivery lead times can be as short as three weeks. Time to market is reduced dramatically and manufacturers can respond extremely quickly to changes in market trends."

The SAA55xx incorporates a variant of the Philips industry-standard  80C51 microcontroller with between 16K and 128K ROM and 1K to 2.25K of RAM. A truly global device, it covers all major standards for TV systems world wide as a selection of integrated options. These include teletext, and ICON OSD (On Screen Display), Closed Captioning and V-Chip for the US and Latin American markets, ideographic characters for the Asian markets and Dynamically Redefinable Character (DRC) sets for OSD and dynamic graphics.

Teletext coverage is the widest available on the market: all European languages, including Cyrillic Greek Arabic and Hebrew, are available on one IC and Farsi, Thai and customer definable options are also available.

The OSD and text capabilities make it possible for manufacturers to develop unique on-screen graphics and generate text in any language (up to 750 fonts are available). Characters can be generated in a wide range of type styles, with special effects including a choice of up to four colors for each character. The character matrix can be 12 x 9 pixels to 12 x 16 pixels and there are also 32 DRCs (Dynamically Redefinable Characters) available. The OSD supports a scroll mode. The flexibility of the OSD allows manufacturers to use screen display as a way of differentiating their sets in the market.

All members of the family have both Idle and Power-down power saving modes, and lower featured devices may also have a Standby power saving mode.

The SAA55xx is supported by development software and full documentation. Qualification samples, a demo board, OTP blanks and volume shipments are all available now.

Philips Semiconductors, a division of Royal Philips Electronics, headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, is the eighth largest semiconductor supplier 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. Additional information on Philips Semiconductors can be obtained by accessing its home page at http://www.semiconductors.philips.com