China's Digital Home Market Is Looking Up For Broadcom
At the moment the Chinese technology market represents many different things to technology companies. For one company in particular it seems to be a market of opportunities. At this year’s China Content Broadcasting Network (CCNB) Conference Broadcom, a supplier of semiconductor for wired and wireless systems, introduced products specially design for the Chinese converging network market. They have also announced two key partnerships with China’s leading Set-top Box (STB) manufacturers.
The Chinese digital home market is on the up due to recent changes in the country’s legislation; now, Chinese cable operators can now upgrade their cable plants to handle tow-way communications for high-speed internal and VoIP communications, said Broadcom. These changes have caused an increase in the demand for connected home devices. With the release of BCM7580 “the industry's first low cost, high definition (HD) DVB-C digital cable converter box system-on-a-chip (SoC) solution” and a customized DOCSIS VoIP product portfolio for the Chinese market, Broadcom has position themselves as a major supplier of digital home technology in this growing market.
The new Broadcom BCM7580 SoC solution features an integrated DVB-C radio frequency (RF) tuner, dynamic power management, an MPEG2/AVC/AVS HD decoder, HDMI, Ethernet and USB, connectivity, a smartcard interface, FLASH and DDR2/3 functions.
Broadcom said they have also partnered with Coship and Sky-worth Hitune, two of China’s leading STB manufacturers. Coship delivers set-top boxes to Topway, a Shenzhen cable service provider and Sky-worth Hitune supplies STB to Beijing’s Gehua Cable, who has already deployed over 300,00 HD Set-top Boxes and is planning to convert another 2.3million customers by 2012.
Both manufacturers have selected Broadcom’s BCM7403 SoC solution, which is tailored to meet the unique needs of the Chinese market and features the following:
- Integrates HD AVC (H.264, MPEG-4), MPEG-2, DivX(R), and VC-1 digital video decoders that enable manufacturers to cost effectively develop extremely high performance STBs that integrate the most advanced hardware features and functionality to securely decode, store and share multiple types of HDTV, VoD, Internet and digital music content.
- Provides advanced DVR capabilities and advanced playback of digital content from non-traditional sources, such as the Web or PC, directly to the television.
- Combines a data transport processor, HD video decoder technology, an advanced audio decoder, 2D graphics processing, high quality video scaling and motion adaptive de-interlacing, six video DACs, stereo high-fidelity, audio DACs, a 450 DMIPS host CPU, advanced security, dual USB 2.0 ports and HDMI 1.3a.
According to BDA research, the Chinese government plans to convert 174 million households to digital programming before 2015, paving the way for the expanded network capacity needed to provide additional HD content and advanced services. This look as though China’s cable operators and Set-top Box manufacturers will be busy for a long time and Broadcom look set to supply the technology.