TV on a chip

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 8 Aug 2002 at 14:01

Digital television has been given a boost with Toshiba's development of a single chip that integrates all the back-end systems of a digital TV.

The specifications of the new chip make it sound more at home in a beige box, and its support for USB among other interfaces, will allow you to hook it up to one.

They include an MPEG-2 decoder for two digital channels (one of them high definition), a 64bit MIPS-based CPU clocked at 200Mhz, support for 133Mhz DDR-SDRAM and an integrated audio processor that decodes AAC and AC3 formats, as well as normal audio.

Mass production will begin this summer.