Zentek Technology Group says its new multimedia home platform (MHP) product family uses Linux and open standards to cut total development costs for set-top box (STB) manufacturers. Zentek's MediaStack-MHP is interoperable with products from development partners ATI and Skelmir, minimizing costs while delivering state-of-the-art STBs for digital television, Zentec claims.

Zentek's embedded Linux based MediaStack-MHP supports ATI's Set-Top Wonder Xilleon reference platform, which is based on ATI's Xilleon 220 STB system-on-chip (SOC) processor.

According to ATI, the Xilleon 220 SOC is suitable for a range of video-oriented digital devices, including set-top boxes, digital TVs, home media gateways, and TV-enabled Web pads. ATI says the high-density chip integrates a 300MHz MIPS architecture CPU along with graphics, video, audio, conditional access, USB, EIDE, PCI, memory controller, and a host of other I/O capabilities, and all that is needed to complete the design of many consumer devices is the addition of tuners, demodulators, modems, and memory.

MediaStack-MHP is also compatible with Skelmir's CEE-J Java virtual machine for hosting MHP, OSGi, browsers, and other virtual machine applications. Skelmir claims CEE-J offers “the lowest usable footprint on the embedded virtual machine market.”

Zentek says its MediaStack-MHP enables the delivery of enhanced digital television applications and services via digital broadcast streams in markets that comply with digital video broadcast (DVB) specifications. Such markets are emerging rapidly in North America, Asia, Europe and Australia, according to Zentek.

David Gould, senior software marketing manager of ATI's DTV Group said, “Zentek and Skelmir provide us with a portable, pre-integrated solution that enables a highly interactive environment that is in demand now by many of our DTV customers.”

 
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