Toshiba device selected by television design house TVonics

The TVonics DVB-T module will allow OEMs to quickly and easily add iDTV functionality to existing televisions. Providing single-stream MPEG-2 decoding, the platform combines Toshiba’s Donau’ TC90403FG multimedia SoC with a tuner and COFDM demodulator, Flash and DDR memory, common interface, and a variety of other functions required to implement a complete DVB-T solution. In particular, the versatile module provides a wide variety of interfaces in order to ease integration into the designs of existing and new TV sets.

The TC90403FG ‘Donau’ SoC at the heart of the TVonics platform brings together Toshiba’s Media embedded Processor (MeP) architecture with a powerful 64-bit embedded RISC host. The MeP architecture effectively frees the host processor from compute-intensive DVB and multimedia processing tasks by providing MPEG video decoding; three-stream audio processing to AAC, MPEG and AC-3 standards; audio post-processing including surround-sound and EQ functions; and a powerful multi-plane graphics engine with hardware accelerator.

Toshiba’s IC also offers on-board interfaces and peripherals that include 8- and 16-bit ITU-601/656 inputs, two DVB common interfaces, two Smartcard interfaces, IDE connectivity, a USB 1.1 host controller, and external 8- and 16-bit bus interfaces. Thirty-two PIO channels (pin shared), two I2C bus connections, four serial I/Os, two PWM channels, IR decoding, an RTC (real time clock), and three 24-bit up-counter timers are also available.

Based on an embedded Linux operating system, the TVonics design provides up to 8Mbytes of 8-bit NOR Flash and a choice of 16 or 32Mbytes of DDR memory. All necessary analogue video and audio signal buffers – including low pass filters are also included. The Toshiba SoC also allows the board to offer a number of interface options such as USB, I2C, RS-232 and a smart card interface.