Las Vegas, NV — (press release excerpt) — Oak Technology today announced the availability of its Cougar-G9 digital TV reference design for the Generation system-on-chip (SOC). The system supports embedded Linux and VxWorks “out of the box.”

Cougar-G9 combines all the core components of digital TV products on a single pre-production board, thereby helping to speed the development of next-generation digital TV offerings priced for the broad consumer market — including televisions, set-top boxes, personal video recorders (PVRs), and digital video recorders (DVRs). Global consumer electronics leaders are already developing Cougar-G9-based digital TV products, which are expected to ship in volume in mid-2003.

The Cougar-G9 reference platform is based on the recently introduced Generation9 system-on-chip which includes a 64-bit CPU, audio Digital Signal Processor, Video Signal Processor, and more. Up to two HD streams or eight SD streams can be decoded simultaneously, and on-chip format conversions assure support of any format in and any format out. A “Media DSP” is used for media streaming applications and audio including Dolby AC3, MPEG AAC, MPEG1 Layer 2 and MP3. A MIPS64 CPU core provides the performance required for next generation TV's and STB's, driven by applications such as HAVi, MHP and OCAP.

Generation9-based system block diagram

In addition to the Generation9 SOC, the Cougar-G9 includes IEEE1394 ICs with content protection from Texas Instruments, IEEE1394/HAVi software from VividLogic, and a Digital Visual Interface (DVI) transmitter from Silicon Image. Also available are options for several add-on boards supporting satellite, terrestrial, and cable tuner front-ends for multiple geographic markets.

A demonstration of the Cougar-G9 reference platform will be available this week at CES 2003 in Las Vegas.

 
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