With an eye to helping OEMs bring hybrid television (analog and digital) products to market faster and making such technology more mainstream, NXP, formerly Philips Semiconductor, has announced two new reference designs for its Nexperia family of media processors.

The new reference designs, Nexperia TV 520/32 for DVB/PAL and Nexperia TV507 for analog TVs work incorporate a chip the company introduced a few months ago. They build on the company’s larger family of reference designs.

The TV520 reference design is built on the Nexperia Home media processor, which provides the IP blocks for MPEG de-multiplexing and decoding, video scaling, de-interlacing, noise reduction, all kinds of video featuring, video rendering, audio decoding, digital-to-analog conversion and audio featuring. It also contains a High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) and an SD/HD analog component input. The TV520 reference design is also scalable to higher-end TV solutions by simply adding a variety of NXP's companion processors.

“Our reference designs are complete TV systems,” said Vince Vermeer, product marketing manager for mainstream LCD TV solutions at NXP. “They are small TV boards, from the antenna all the way to the interface to the LCD panel.”

NXP says the device is the first to  offer a single silicon platform for digital and analog high density LCD TVs for all consumer markets globally.  That’s a big help to OEMs who can now design for one chip and not worry about creating different versions for different geographic markets. Both of NXP’s new reference designs are based on a single global silicon platform that enables TV makers to develop hybrid digital and analog LCD TV sets. In addition, all members of the family are pin-to-pin compatible, which means TV designers can re-use the investments across a range of products.

One of the only chips not included is the channel decoder. That lets OEMs just switch out the channel decoder chip depending on the geographic market.

For consumers that hybrid model in many cases means a simplified interface. They no longer need to distinguish between which channels are received as analog and which are received as digital and switch between the two. The difference between the two kinds of channels becomes invisible to the end user.

Consumers are likely to see another difference too – better picture quality.
“We feel with this chipset we bring a lot of good picture quality features into the mainstream,” Vermeer said. “We feel we give a high level of picture quality to those solutions.” The company is showing off that picture quality this week at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin.

NXP believes that with the mandate from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission coming regarding the transition from analog to digital, more TVs will need to include both.  NXP said the analog-only version is for such markets that don’t have such requirements, and the bill of materials cost for that device is $8 to $10 less than for the hybrid device.

But NXP is not releasing publicly the price of the reference designs themselves yet, saying only that they are competitive.  They reference designs themselves will be available in Europe and Asia/Pacific in Q1, 2007, NXP said.