Broadcom and RaisingSun Collaborate to Deliver Industry's First Digital TV Solution for China's Television Market

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007
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Combination of Broadcom’s Television-on-a-Chip Platform and RaisingSun’s iTVware Middleware Provides an All-in-One China Standards Compliant DTV Solution

IRVINE, Calif. — Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq: BRCM), a global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, today announced a collaboration with RaisingSun Digital Video Technology Company of Shanghai, China, that provides the industry’s first complete digital television (DTV) solution for China’s television market. Through the combination of Broadcom’s television-on-a-chip platform (BCM3560/BCM3563) and RaisingSun’s iTVware middleware, TV manufacturers are able to develop complete lines of affordable digital televisions for the Chinese market that support all of China’s standards while delivering superior picture, sound and graphics quality. No other solution in the market today provides all-in-one compliance with China’s DTV standards.

The Chinese domestic television market currently utilizes different flavors of DTV standards, including its own terrestrial modulation and cable card specifications in support of the country’s initiative to convert analog TV services to digital TV services by 2015. With this mandatory transition to digital TV, Broadcom and RaisingSun joined forces; whereby RaisingSun provides the availability of DTV middleware that has been ported onto the popular Broadcom® BCM356x series of television-on-a-chip platforms, providing compliance with all China DTV standards. The result of this collaboration enables DTV manufacturers to provide faster time-to-market for China-specific DTV solutions.

“By working with RaisingSun, Broadcom is the first company to provide a highly integrated, yet flexible time-to-market solution for China’s DTV market,” said Stuart Thomson, Director of Product Marketing for Broadcom’s Digital TV line of business. “With RaisingSun’s middleware optimized for the Chinese DTV market and our BCM356x series platform, the complete solution eliminates large upfront investments in engineering, field testing and standards compliance testing, enabling Broadcom to be well positioned as the technology and integration provider for China’s DTV requirements.”

“RaisingSun selected Broadcom’s advanced television-on-a-chip solution as our first supported iTVware middleware platform based on the high integration, exceptional video quality, powerful CPU processing and rich functionality that significantly reduces the development cycle,” said Peter Zhu, General Manager of RaisingSun. “We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Broadcom to meet the requirements of the Chinese digital TV market.”

BCM3560 and BCM3563 Product Information

The Broadcom® BCM3560 and BCM3563 highly integrated system-on-a-chip (SoC) television solutions enable manufacturers to develop complete lines of affordable TVs in support of analog, high definition, standard definition, and digital cable television programming that feature superior video, sound and graphics quality. The level of integration and advanced performance achieved with the BCM3560 and BCM3563 are enabling manufacturers to cost effectively transition product lines to affordable high-quality analog/digital televisions in a variety of size and display options.

The “television-on-a-chip” solution integrates video processing functions that enable DTV makers to customize the video output to support multiple television displays, including liquid crystal displays (LCDs), plasma displays, cathode ray tube (CRT) displays and projection technology. This capability, coupled with additional BCM3560 and BCM3563 features, guarantees high-quality picture and sound, and significantly decreases the number of chips required in a TV system, making it more cost effective for manufacturers to build televisions that support both analog and digital reception.

Advanced features in the BCM3560 include picture-in-picture (PIP) capabilities, an advanced 3-D comb Y/C standard separation circuitry, a multi-field de-interlace circuitry, proprietary picture improvement functions, digital and analog video output interfaces and video scalars. The advanced system architecture enables the BCM3560 to reliably acquire, track and demodulate signals in the presence of interference or a wide range of varying multi-path channel conditions that experience the presence of noise.

The BCM3563 is a highly integrated solution that adds full 1080p support and two NTSC/PAL video decoders, with each decoder supported by its own 3D comb filter and motion adaptive de-interlacing capability. The combination of advanced video and audio features and tight integration, ensure high-quality picture and sound while reducing the number of chips and bill-of-materials (BOM) cost required to build full high definition 1080p televisions supporting both analog and digital reception.

iTVware Product Information

With its accumulated technical advantages and innovation in digital video household appliance product design, RaisingSun has developed the first complete middleware platform (iTVware) for digital television applications in China. The iTVware middleware has a comprehensive universal extension interface for wireless multimedia, network multimedia and mature application module requirements, and is currently available for developing DTMB (China terrestrial DTV standard) and digital video broadcast (DVB)-based HDTVs in China and advanced television systems committee (ATSC)-based HDTVs in the U.S. In its third generation, iTVware has been tested by the third parties in the China market and North America.