1 -12/2012
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TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 1 -12/2012
—
www.TELE-satellite.com
TEST REPORT
Receiver Chip
HISILICON HI3716C
Do-it-all chipset for receivers that incorporates
all of today’s digital services
A New Do-it-all Chip
for Digital Receivers
A digital receiver, regard-
less if it’s a receiver for satel-
lite reception, for terrestrial
reception, to connect to a ca-
ble network or if it’s a media
player with Internet access,
is comprised in essence of
an SoC (“System on Chip”).
It consists of a microproces-
sor that combines all of the
critical components (such as
CPU, graphics, de-multiplex-
er, controller, memory inter-
face, audio chip, etc.).
Receiver manufacturers
then need to incorporate
RAM, flash memory as well as
a tuner, network chip, front-
end processor (for the re-
mote control and TV screen),
etc., around the SoC in order
to build a complete receiver.
Typically the SoC chip
manufacturer will provide a
corresponding development
environment with OEM firm-
ware and a hardware refer-
ence design so that receiver
manufacturers can test a
simplified version of the end-
product.
HISILICON, a company of
the Huawei Group, is an old
familiar name in the semicon-
Reference designs
already exist, here in
form of a high-end
Linux HD STB.
ductor industry for telecom-
munications and consumer
electronics and with its chips
in China one of the leaders
in the DVB-C and IPTV mar-
kets. Beyond all that, most of
our readers will recognize the
Huawei company name from
the world of mobile phones.
To further expand their
market position, Huawei has
recently introduced their lat-
est SoC. And this one has
what it takes: finally there’s
an SoC for receivers that are
based on the ARM architec-
ture, specifically on the ARM
A9 processor. This means
that not only does Linux run
directly on the chip but also
Android 4.x. This SoC also
has a 3D graphics portion
built into it with which current
3
D games would function.
Yet the HI3716 can do even
more in that it also has inter-
faces for DVB tuners, hard
drives and networks. Re-
ceivers that will be based on
the HI3716C chip should be
very exciting; you’ll be able
to play 3D games on an An-
droid satellite receiver with
enough power. The capabili-
ties of this SoC chip are, ac-
cording to the manufacturer,
amazing:
Open Architecture
•
Support from Linux and
Android operating systems
•
Open-Source
•
High performance 3D
graphics component with
support from OpenGL for
games and flash acceleration
Communication
•
Video Telephony
•
Voice Over Internet Pro-
tocol (VoIP)
Modern receivers are based primarily on a single chip,
the SoC, that combines all of the important functions.
With the HI3716C, HISILICON is starting a market of-
fensive. We took a closer look at the technical specifi-
cations of these new chips so that we could get a better
idea of what kind of functions future receivers would
have with these chips.