Applications

The evolution of consumer media devices and video processing is driving the development of higher-power, highly integrated computing power and peripherals requiring interconnect solutions to solve the problems connecting many peripherals moving large amounts of data between peripherals, storage and computing resources.

To connect peripherals, PCI and PCI express busses are commonly used. To meet these needs Tundra supplies a range of PCI bridges and Power Architecture^TM host bridges.

Home Media – Set Top Box

The widespread adoption of digital television and high bandwidth media has spawned many applications like HDTV terminals, personal video recorders, and home media centers. These devices are growing in popularity as consumer products. To keep up with the growth in high-resolution digital media content, more computing power is needed while maintaining price points suitable for the consumer market. Tundra’s Bridges are a perfect companion for high performance, cost sensitive PowerPC processors that are used in set top box designs.

Consumer and Security - Digital Video Recorder

The demand for digital video recording devices is growing due to increasing public security concerns and consumer demand for accessible digital video capture and recording devices. Manufacturers have a growing opportunity to provide consumers, businesses and public agencies new products to take advantage of ubiquitous internet access and availability of high capacity, low cost storage for transmitting and storing video conveniently.

Video surveillance and recording systems are commonly implemented taking one of two approaches: Embedded and PC based. Both systems require the input of multiple video channels into a single capture card or video board. This is achieved by integrating a number of video decoder chips into a system – Typically, these devices output digital video data through a PCI bus interface. To connect these devices to processing hardware for video compression and processing a PCI-PCI bridge such as the Tsi340™ is required.

In a PC-based system a capture card will reside in a standard PCI expansion slot using the PC’s hardware for further processing. Intensive video tasks may be handled by the standard CPU and specialized video processing engines.

Embedded systems will integrate video processing hardware such as specialized video processors and/or an embedded CPU or DSP.
PowerPC processors are an excellent choice for delivering high performance while consuming minimal power at a low cost. Designers can take advantage of a PowerPC Host Bridge like the Tsi110™ that can provide the benefits of low cost and power by integrating numerous system level features on the host bridge.