Jim Davis | GMT Aug 14, 2000, 07:00 PM
San Francisco - Chip designer TeraLogic and software company VividLogic have partnered to offer an off-the-shelf platform for digital televisions that could speed the development of home audio/visual equipment updated with Internet-era networking capabilities.
With the complexity of consumer electronics devices growing at a rapid clip, the CE manufacturers are facing new design challenges: how to make their products relevant in an era where consumers are increasingly downloading video and music from the Internet. Attaching a TV or stereo receiver to a home network that's in turn connected to the Internet is seen as the answer, but turning ideas into reality gets to be an order of magnitude more difficult. As a result, manufacturers are increasingly reaching for technology from outside of their own labs to speed the product development cycle.
"Digital consumer devices are getting more complex. It takes a longer time to design them, and they have more software than they used to," said Mark O'Brien, director of business development at TeraLogic. Companies can still elect to do all the chips and software themselves, but the time needed to create those kinds of products is getting to be prohibitively long and expensive, he notes. As a result of the collaboration, TeraLogic hopes to speed the process by offering its customers HAVi networking capabilities on its Cougar reference platform for DTVs and digital TV set-top receivers.
The offering from TeraLogic and VividLogic is only the latest bit of evidence that CE companies are in the midst of a profound change in their product design philosophies. Sony, Matsushita, and Toshiba (soon, Hitachi, too), have put aside their usual animosity and recently stated plans to work together on developing a digital platform for interactive television. Sony, one of the key proponents of the HAVi networking protocol, recently invested in TeraLogic, and Mitsubishi, one of the biggest makers of projection TVs, has already signed with VividLogic for its FireBus HAVi software.
HAVi and similar networking schemes such as Sun's Jini and Microsoft's Universal Plug and Play are designed to let things already attached to a network – a TV, PC, handheld, home climate control systems, etc – discover new resources as they get plugged in. Consumers might view lists of devices on a TV screen, for instance, and use a remote to send a file from a video camera to the PC for editing and then proceed to download the latest energy usage stats on their household from their energy provider. Each of these schemes is unlikely to be the sole networking protocol in a home network, which only raises the complexity of hardware design.
"No one network will meet needs of all systems of the house," therefore, there's a need for a network management operating system, said Shiva Patibanda, CEO of VividLogic. At the same time, the consumer electronics industry brings with it a legacy of not being connected to digital networks. Getting devices from different brands to work together is proving to be difficult; the natural result is that manufacturers are turning to independent third-party companies for development of needed technologies.
It's not that the likes of Sony and Philips can't work together, or can't write the software – they have developed prototype HAVi code in-house. But in the meantime, there have been problems at some companies in getting new DTV products out the door, with software design being a key sticking point. An independent company like Vivid Logic has an incentive to getting networking software to run on all IEEE 1394 chipsets and all manner of operating systems, says Patibanda. (FireBus will eventually run on Windows CE, VxWorks, PSOS and Linux OS, according to the company).
There's an additional benefit of having usually separate hardware and software items already being tested for a manufacturer. "There's a need for an off-the-shelf HAVi solution. If you build your own, the chances of it interoperating are slim. This is one of those technologies that (manufacturers) will go out and buy," said Patibanda. "We will guarantee it is interoperable."
VividLogic's software is already slated for use in Mitsubishi products. Mitsubishi is developing an upgrade module for projection TVs that will allow it to receive DTV signals from cable networks via an IEEE 1394 interconnect. The module will support the ability to connect with other HAVi devices. VividLogic is expected to add support in its product line for Microsoft's UpnP in the near future.
Other small, independent companies joining VividLogic in the race to connect the home are companies like Digital Harmony and BeComm. Digital Harmony is offering a chip, software for client control devices (remotes, PCs, and Macs) and interoperability testing services to bring home A/V equipment together over IEEE 1394 connections. The company has mostly signed on audio companies – Denon, Harmon/Kardon, Boston Acoustics being the biggest names – to use its products. The company is reported to be working on offering HAVi compatibility.
BeComm, meanwhile, is working on software that can reside on top of networking protocols such as HAVi. While its main stated function is to allow any kind of content to run on any kind of device, the interesting addition to the mix is that the company's software would let interconnected devices share processing power. This would allow a PC to download Web content and stream it to a handheld in the appropriate format; a handheld could use the PC to play back MP3 files without actually having MP3 decoding software reside in the device.
BeComm's software, called 'Strings,' doesn't require applications to be rewritten to take advantage of its media and processor sharing features, an important consideration that removes a barrier to acceptance in home networking products. One difference from other protocols is that Strings will have a minimal impact on the cost to build devices. William Howe, director of marketing for BeComm, noted that Jini requires a virtual machine (VM) to interpret code, meaning more memory is needed in a device; Strings does not. It's less clear how UpnP will work, but if it requires some form of an operating system or VM, it too will require more memory than Strings, he claims. Every extra bit of memory in consumer devices is a costly addition.
BeComm will be updating its progress in this space soon. Howe said that one of the current problems for hardware manufacturers is that they are often tied to the development cycles of service providers. BeComm is working on ways to help companies update their products with software downloads, making more advanced 'future-proofing' services available to a user without hardware upgrades. One possibility is that the company could partner with a 'push' software provider such as Marimba to offer software management services to hardware companies. The company's software could also be of use to cable set-top manufacturers who might roll out basic set-tops and then upgrade them with advanced interactive features as they finish development work.
Howe declined to elaborate on the nature of the announcement, but said "We will work with manufacturers and OEMs to break the development cycle."
As one of the early providers of HAVi software, VividLogic is currently in the driver's seat for this nascent market. The company's software is almost guaranteed to find its way into upcoming Sony DTVs, what with Sony's investment in TeraLogic and VividLogic's hand in helping develop the HAVi specification. That in turn should generate some interest from companies like Cisco, 3Com, Conexant, and Broadcom, who are all looking to play in the consumer networking market and want a nice seat at the table with consumer electronics companies.