In a newsletter on what’s new in Texas Instruments this week the company pointed out that it now has a development kit for using its DaVinci set top architecture with Microsoft’s CE operating system.
We find that announcement somewhat strange given that Texas announced DaVinci at the 2005 IBC show in Amsterdam saying that it was coming out then in both Linux and CE versions.
Texas has put Microsoft operating systems on its DSP based systems before and Microsoft is known to insist on the use of CE in set tops for its IPTV middleware. Perhaps one of Texas’ DaVinci set top customers has finally got a piece of a contract at one of Microsoft’s IPTV installations, and Texas has finally rushed out the drivers and development kit for DaVinci.
The announcement sneaked out in mid February, but was bypassed by most IPTV media. The CE SDK is designed for use with the system-on-chip (SoC) processors for DaVinci and includes drivers, OS adaptation layer, interprocessor communication and the DaVinci Codec Engine.
An SDK for Windows Embedded CE 6.0 for the general market is planned for 2Q 2007 and will first be available from Mistral. Other TI DSP third parties are currently offering complete Windows CE 6.0 enabled reference solutions, such as the recently announced Wireless Network Projector reference design by Ingenient and the videophone reference design by Ittiam, both based on DaVinci technology.
Other ASPs supporting CE on Texas are eInfochips, MPC Data, Logic Product Development, eSOL Co. Ltd. and Wintech Digital Systems Technology Corp.