Fujitsu Microelectronics Shipped over 500,000 MB86H60 High Definition Set Top Boxes

SHANGHAI — Fujitsu Microelectronics (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. today announced that 500,000 set top box chips with Fujitsu’s MB86H60 high definition solution have been shipped since December 2009. It is predicted that the shipment of high definition products will exceed one million. With open software and hardware separation platform, Fujitsu has become leading supplier of high definition set-top-box chips and main chip supplier for cable television network in Guangxi Province, China, and leads the development of high definition set-top-box technology in China.

Cable television network operators in Guangxi Province, China apply open platform to high definition digital televisions and eliminate technical barrier between CA and middleware. Fujitsu is pleased to join in R&D team which is composed of operators, set-top-box companies, software platform companies and chip companies and aims to develop unified open platform.

Unified open platform can really achieve the separation of software and hardware for set top box. This platform selects advanced open ARM11 CPU architecture and open downloadable CA without card, and enables set-top-box software engineers to develop set-top-box software in an open environment. Meanwhile, unified open driver software interface used by this platform can minimize the difference between set-top-box hardware platforms, realize similar separation of software and hardware with PC industry, and make software and hardware compete in their own fields.

Unified open platform allows more set-top-box chips to participate in the competition, which brings great pressure to set-top-box chip manufacturers. However, Fujitsu thinks that only the competition between chip manufacturers can make the superior win and the inferior wash out, driving the development of broadcasting and television industry and advancing chip industry. In terms of product process, Fujitsu produces high definition set-top-box chip with 90nm process and now accelerates the development of next generation 65nm and 40nm low-power energy-saving high-definition set-top-box chips to keep up with the development of open platform. With Fujitsu’s advanced set-top-box chip, each set top box can save 10 dollars of electric charge over its service life, which will make over 100 million dollars of power saving throughout Guangxi Province, China. At the same time, to adapt to the competition brought by the merge of 3 communication networks, Fujitsu thinks that set-top-box chip with MPEG2 decoding technology has too many limitations and goes against business development, so H.264, AVS and other video decoding formats should be supported. In addition, to make the chip meet the requirements of unified open platform better and bring set-top-box chip to market quickly, Fujitsu uses the technology for regulating and opening set-top-box software interface developed by Shandong Taixin Electronics Co., Ltd., combines downloadable CA system compatible with intelligent card CA, and creates an open and new era for digital television technology.

Andy Chang, senior marketing director of Asia Pacific Area of Fujitsu Microelectronics, said: “Fujitsu actively cooperates with operators, software technology providers, Jiuzhou Electronic Technology Co., Ltd and many other set-top-box manufacturers and launches high definition set-top-box product for unified open platform, which have been recognized by many operators and related partners in Guangxi Province, China. Nowadays, broadcasting and television industry in Guangxi Province, China takes the leading place in technology accumulation and user development. We believe that as unified open platform is highly recognized by operators and open system software manufacturers, set-top-box manufacturers and chip manufacturers strengthen their cooperation, the mode to generalize high definition will be accepted by more and more operators and lead the development of high-definition digital television. Fujitsu Microelectronics is eager to cooperate with more partners to provide complete solution for industry chain and offer high-quality set-top-box solution and service to more operators.”