Toshiba's home entertainment gateway platform

San Jose, Ca. -- Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. has taken the wraps off the details of a complete integrated TX49 RISC processor-based reference platform based on the PCI bus for entertainment home gateway applications.

Five other companies --- Lineo, Systemonic, Sigma Designs, Vweb and Wipro Ltd. - worked with the company on its design. They are all gambling that the market analysts are right in their belief that while the definition of an entertainment home gateway is still emerging, conceptually, it will serve as the pivotal point between public and home networks, connecting the public packet network to the residential network.

They are also assuming that this gateway will be implemented as a single box, the entertainment gateway will route the data, audio and video via a wired or wireless connection to a client product, such as a telephone, PC, TV, VCR or game console. The gateway server is also responsible for secure routing and switching, including content protection.

To that end their entertainment home gateway reference platform as been designed with virtually all the options covered. It includes complete hardware and system-level software for a wide variety of entertainment applications and target platforms, optimized for the TX49 64-bit RISC processor, which includes an integrated memory controller, a Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) controller, Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitters, timers, a serial peripheral interface, an Audio Codec '97 interface and a triple Data Encryption Standard engine.

The board also includes the company's TC86C001FG companion chip, which supports the PCI interface, the Inter-IC bus, Universal Serial Bus (USB) hosts, USB devices, Integrated Drive Electronics Ultra-DMA mode 4 interface, and general parallel input/output (I/O) and serial I/O.

Available now, the reference platforms other features include Sigma Designs' DVD/MPEG-4 decoder with full-screen MPEG-4 playback; Systemonic's programmable Tondelayo 802.11a+b controller for W-LAN communication with "detect and connect" capability; Vweb's MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 codec, MPEG-2 and -4 transcoding on the fly as well as Lineo and Wipro's communications, virtual private network engine and voice over IP development software on embedded Linux.

For more information on this product, go to www.gateway.toshiba.com.

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