Digital Home – The New Connected Digital Home
Whether it’s using a smartphone to look up information while on the road; shooting, uploading and sharing pictures and videos using a digital camera; or selecting a movie online and enjoying it on an HDTV, today’s consumers increasingly expect access to information and content anytime and anywhere. As such, compared to the previous generation, today’s consumer entertainment devices are smarter, more integrated and connected, and intended to deliver an overall better user experience.Digital home devices are at the center of the consumer entertainment experience, providing easy capture of pictures and videos, as well as access to high-definition movies, music, photos, and games in the comfort of one’s home. In addition to enjoying content provided by cable and satellite providers through set-top boxes and physical media such as Blu-ray players, digital home devices are adding internet connectivity to enable users to enjoy cloud-based video and TV programming from providers such as Netflix and Hulu, voice/video conferencing capabilities such as Skype, and much more. These "smart" digital home devices can also access movies, pictures, and music via any DLNA-capable device on a local network.
Software platforms such as Android, HTML5, WebGL, Java, Flash Player and JavaScript widget engines are required to enable users to access and interact with the rich content available from diverse sources.
To enable tomorrow’s devices and technologies, new software platforms must be capable of handling high-definition transport streams for digital broadcast and IPTV; integrating with existing middleware and offering client/server support for video-on-demand; providing conditional access and security for protected content; conforming with DLNA standards for network access and content sharing; and providing a viable “living room” user interface for remote control support, large screen UI and menu system. Other necessities include a full web experience, hardware-accelerated HD video and multi-channel audio support, and support for 2D/3D accelerated graphics hardware.
All of this places an increased demand for high performance on SoC designs for digital home devices such as digital television (DTV), set-top boxes (STBs) and Blu-ray disc (BD) players.
An example for an Android digital home software architecture
CPU requirements have increased tremendously as system software has moved from simple RTOS/kernels to full operating systems supporting multimedia, multi-tasking, 3D interactive user interfaces, and virtualization technologies such as Java, Flash Player, JavaScript, and Android. Much of this software will require embedded processor performance surpassing 1GHz and can easily take advantage of multi-core, multi-threaded CPU architectures to optimize power consumption as well as performance.
MIPS® Solutions
In next-generation connected devices, numerous applications will be launched and run simultaneously. A typical example would be launching an HTML5-based online video player while recording a broadcast stream in the background. A multi-threaded, multi-core MIPS processor is an ideal fit for these new multi-tasking platforms.
A broad product line allows MIPS cores to be used not only for the applications processor supporting complex user interfaces, DRM and audio, but also for control plane processing functions such as audio, networking, security and I/O distributed to various SoC subsystems.
The continually decreasing price of consumer products, coupled with the ever-increasing need for the best possible user experience for content and connectivity has driven the need for high-performance, yet cost-effective embedded processor cores with a wide range of performance points and a rich ecosystem of software support. This includes a vast array of DTV, STB, and BD middleware, and rich operating systems such as Linux and Android that are fully optimized for the MIPS® architecture.
Most leading SoC vendors today have selected the MIPS architecture for digital home devices. With its industry standard architecture, licensable cores and broad software support, MIPS Technologies and its ecosystem help developers of SoCs for today’s digital home devices quickly bring differentiated solutions to market.
