Philips will switch some of its reference designs for digital TV set-top boxes (STBs) and bolt-on receivers from pSos+ to eCos, according to eCosCentric. eCosCentric's eCosPro Starter Kit will be distributed as the “de-facto supplied RTOS” for some Nexperia PNX83xx designs, eCosCentric says.

Nexperia PNX83xx designs

The Nexperia PNX83xx reference designs target digital STBs and TVs with integrated digital receivers (iDTVs). They are based on a 120MIPS (millions of instructions per second) processor, and have 4MB of flash and 16MB of SDRAM.

Philips's Nexperia PNX83xx design diagram
The first PNX83xx design to ship with eCosCentric's “eCosPro Starter Kit” will be an STB200 DVB-T design for STBs. Following the validation of STB-specific software stacks, such as “MHP,” eCosPro will be provided for customer evaluation with additional Nexperia PNX83xx designs, eCosCentric says.

eCosPro

eCosCentric describes its eCosPro product as a commercial-grade version of the open source eCos RTOS for deeply embedded systems. The company's eCosPro Starter Kit includes a GNU-based compiler/debugger toolchain, graphical eCos Configuration tool, and certified RedBoot binaries, and will let Philips customers evaluate eCos for their designs, it says.

Additionally, the “Starter Kit” is upgradeable to a “Developer's Kit” version that includes commercial support and advice, an eclipse-based graphical IDE and debugger, profiling tools, code coverage and memory allocation debugging tools, and a C++ runtime with standard template library. Available third-party components include a Java VM, GUIs, and USB and CANbus stacks.

Ronald Struik, partner program manager for Philips's STB and home media device designs, stated, “eCosCentric clearly helps us to improve the positioning of our STB2xx turnkey system solutions for the very cost sensitive DVB Set-Top-Box market.”

Daniel Morris, sales and marketing director at eCosCentric, stated, “This decision liberates Philips from the technical and licensing restrictions of their legacy proprietary RTOS.”

Philips also has supported Linux on some of its Nexperia-based designs, such as its STB810 design for IP-STBs.

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