Increasingly designers around the world are trying to put TV tuners in to Netbooks, but they have to do it without draining the battery and with some chance that the signal will be strong enough to deliver decent TV. The other criteria is to create one chip to offer globally, to work with any TV system.
Last week we had a little dig at a CrestaTech for claiming that it had put every digital TV format around the world on a single chip, pointing out that what we thought it meant was that it had put out an RF chip which offered software demodulation for all those TV formats. We also pointed out that UK RF chip designer Mirics had done this a full year earlier, and for the most part has been targeting the trickier mobile TV formats.
This week Mirics has released a version of its FlexiTV which will work with the Nvidia’s Cuda-based parallel graphics chips. The result is that it can offer broadcast TV with one chip on almost any PC platform, from desktops, down to and including netbooks.
Chet Babla, the Director of Marketing for Mirics in APAC told us this week, ‘You have to offload H.264 HD decoding to another processor on consumer PCs, otherwise the CPU can’t run other applications, even basic house keeping activities. So to support HD decode on a consumer PC you must have a separate GPU.’
So although Mirics has already announced FlexiTV plans for both ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 applications processors and an Intel ATOM version of its FlexiTV software, it thinks the Cuda engine, which has a potential market of around 100 million GPU-enabled products, including Nvidia’s GeForce, Tesla, Quadro and ION graphics processors ranges, will bring it widespread inclusion at the portable end of PC devices.
Its software has already been demonstrated offering HD reception on DVB-T and ISDB-T broadcasts and it has also released products that can decode ISDB-T OneSeg, T-DMB, DAB, as well as FM broadcasts. We understand it to be working on a CMMB implementation for China as well and we assume it is developing a software implementation for ATSC.
Mirics said in a statement, ‘By leveraging the massively parallel Nvidia Cuda architecture for the Mirics FlexiTV software-based receiver, a universal low-cost TV receiver can now be implemented on entry-level PCs that have Cuda enabled Nvidia GPUs.’
Given that the Mirics RF component was announced at less than $3 when we last spoke to them, and the rest of this is free software, it should be pretty attractive for Netbook makers to add TV watching to their designs, and with Mirics this can now be done on ARM, Atom, or any device which has an Nvidia Graphics chip based on Cuda. Some of the FlexiTV algorithms run on the Nvidia Cuda which uses separate compute engines for video decoding,
CrestaTech from California last week announced its own RF chip to support DVB-T, ATSC, Cable QAM, NTSC and PAL, FM radio and peculiarly had GPS capabilities to locates your position and configure your PC to download an EPG of local channels. Of course that would only work if you take your PC outside for a while to catch the local GPS signal. The existence of a broadcast signal should surely be enough to manage that job anyway.
Mirics just secured a further $7 million of funding back in January bringing total investor financial support to $22 million.
Nvidia Cuda is a general purpose parallel computing architecture which solves complex computational problems in a fraction of the time it might take a traditional CPU. But to program to the Cuda architecture developers can simply use C, one of the most widely used high-level programming languages.