Broadcom said this week that it was among the first chip makers to offer a digital TV receiver which will do everything required for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA’s) digital-to-analog converter box, built in a 65 Nanometer process on a single chip.
The fact that there is a budget of $1.5 billion set aside to subsidize up to two $40 converters per home, is perhaps the main incentive for Broadcom to get its chip to market early and begin to integrate it into devices. Other chip makers will not be far behind announcing their chips given that 100% of US TVs need to be converted to digital or replaced with ATSC devices, by February 2009.
Broadcom said it has introduced a turnkey digital television-on-chip (TVoC) and associated software to enable digital-to-analog converter boxes, extending the lives of analog-only TVs.
The same business in Europe enabling an analog TV to receive DVB-T has proved to be a lucrative business for around 60 device makers and a handful of local chip suppliers and this is set to accelerate as each country closers its analog spectrum off between now and 2012. The US subsidy program begins on January 1, 2008 and ends in March, 2009.
Broadcom’s chip is the BCM3543 ATSC receiver designed to receive ATSC signals up to high definition television and convert them to NTSC (National Television Systems Committee) signals and is built around a MIPS processor like so many of its designs.