Chet Babla of Mirics Semiconductor has published a technical paper on multistandard Broadcast receivers implemented with a Mirics FlexiTV RF front end plus x86 processing for the baseband.
They implemented this on a 2.6GHz dual core x86 processor. Benchmarking standard definition (SD) DVB-T required 25% of the CPU load. The media player decoding of the SD stream was 5% of the load.
On the same platform they were not able to achieve HD but suggested the GPU as a future direction.
Simon Atkinson, Mirics’ CEO, told EE Times that their solution supports a number of digital radio and TV standards. They include AM, FM, DAB, Korea’s T-DMB, Europe’s DVB-T and Japan’s ISDB-T. Still in development are PAL/NTSC, CMMB, DTMB and ATSC.
Atkinson also revealed that Mirics is working on hybrid solutions for cell phones, Mobile Internet Devices (MID), and other portable consumer devices. These are rumored to be ARM + GPU implementations.
Atkinson believes this approach will bring universal broadcast reception to under $5.
Mirics is working with AzureWave (Taiwan) (part of the ASUStek group) and Spreadtrum Communications (China).
