Conexant's broadband communications portfolio includes a comprehensive suite of semiconductor solutions that enable the digital home and information network. Conexant's interactive TV decoder products provide complete single IC system solutions for the core electronics of high performance set-top boxes (STB) deployed in digital satellite, cable or terrestrial TV networks. The CX24153/4/6 IC family offers a high performance embedded 32-bit RISC CPU, a complete DVB/DIRECTV � broadcast service decoder system and advanced 2D graphics and display compositing performance. This combination enables consumer electronics manufacturers to build low-cost digital TV STBs to support a wide range of advanced, interactive, consumer services.

The CX24153/4/6's powerful ARM920 32-bit RISC processor and advanced video/graphics display controller provide a platform ideally suited to support advanced interactive middleware platforms including OpenTV, MHP , and Liberate. The embedded processor offers to 224 Dhrystone 2.1 MIPS a 200MHz clock speed. This CPU platform represents a major advance in capability for the low cost STB category and will enable complex, MIPS hungry, feature rich middleware platforms such as Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) to be adopted by broadcasters for low cost STBs. The advanced CPU platform delivers performance that can be deployed by STB manufacturers in a variety of ways including improved interactive application loading and EPG scrolling performance, H/W feature differentiation via multimedia host signal processing and scalability to Linux based S/W platforms via MMU

MPEG-2/DVB/DIRECTV � broadcast service decoder for worldwide markets Single IC STB solution with integrated NTSC 3/4 RF modulator High-performance 32-bit 220 MIPS ARM920 CPU with & D caches High-performance 2D graphics rendering acceleration Multiplane video/graphics compositing and display engine High-performance or 32-bit unified memory controller architecture

H/W support. A powerful video/graphics display compositing engine supports up to five independent image planes to enable the rich visual interface required for simultaneous TV viewing and application interaction. Conexant's 2D graphics rendering engine can composite an unlimited number of graphics planes with transparency into a single displayable OSD plane. Additionally, the CX24153/4/6 provides ample CPU processing power to support implementation of a complete, low-speed modem datapump and controller in software. Conexant's interactive TV decoders feature an innovative, unified memory architecture that reduces memory costs by servicing all system requirements in a single x16 SDRAM IC. System hardware costs are further minimized by implementing analog modem return path functionality in software running

on the ARM920 CPU. Additional contributions to system bill-of-materials cost reductions come from an integrated NTSC channel 3/4 RF modulator, integrated VCXO and system clock generation and an integrated DVB Common Interface Module Controller.

STB manufacturers increasingly look to leverage a common hardware platform that can be reused over various broadband networks including satellite, cable, terrestrial, DSL and Ethernet IP networks. Conexant's CX24153/4/6 IC's can serve as a common back-end platform that easily interfaces to a variety of broadband front-ends, including QPSK, QAM, OFDM, VSB, ADSL/VDSL, 802.11a/b/g, or IEEE 1394 through either transport stream or PCI interface. This provides a flexible STB solution that can be targeted to a variety of broadband operators while minimizing hardware/software development costs. Conexant also offers a variety of pin compatible CX24153/4/6 options to target network configurations for DVB-MHP , DVB-C, DVB-T, Free-To-Air, and FTA-CI.

The CX24153/4/6 IC family is integrated into a fully engineered interactive TV STB reference development system that implements third-party interactive middleware/RTOS platforms and provides complete STB functionality. The hardware platform comes equipped with fully integrated OpenTV, Alticast, Nucleus+, pSOS and VxWorks runtime libraries and driver software components. A mature and robust hardware abstraction layer is assured by re-use of core driver libraries developed on early generation ICs. The development platform set-top box hardware is designed with a two-layer PCB configuration and a variety of PSTN modem options. A choice of two robust tool chain development environments are supported for code developers including the ADS 1.2 from ARM, Inc. and Tornado 2.2 from WindRiver Systems, Inc. Conexant offers a complete development code solution that has been tightly integrated with both third party tool chain environments.