Broadcom Unveils SoC Designed Using 40 nm CMOS Technology

Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq: BRCM), a global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, today announced and is sampling a new ultra-high performance dual high definition (HD) set-top box (STB) system-on-a-chip (SoC) video gateway solution with more than two times the performance over previous generations.

Designed in 40nm CMOS silicon technology, the BCM7422 achieves breakthrough levels of performance and integration, reducing power consumption and lowering overall costs to meet the need for the next generation connected home experience.

The BCM7422 is the industry's first SoC to combine a 1.3 GHz multi-threaded MIPS® processor with the latest transmission efficient H.264/MPEG Scalable Video Coding (SVC), and Multiview Video Coding (MVC) standards for enabling 1080p60/50 content distribution and full-resolution HD 3DTV. Complementing this new level of application software and visual performance is a 1G pixel per second OpenGL® ES 2.0 3D GPU for advanced 3D graphics acceleration, as well as integrated whole-home connectivity functionality including MoCA® and DLNA® support to advance the connected home set-top box experience to the next level.

Broadcom will demonstrate the advanced capabilities of its BCM7422 STB SoC at its Analyst Day event on December 14 with a live webcast starting at 8am PST.

Highlights/Key Facts:

• The BCM7422 HD STB SoC solution features an ultra-high performance BRCM 5000 MIPS-based applications processor with 3000 DMIPS of applications processing performance supported by unique and powerful 2D and OpenGL ES 2.0 3D GPU's to further enhance web-based software platforms.
• Its distinctive distributed processing STB architecture features an additional 3000 DMIPS (total of 6000 DMIPS) of multiple high-performance sub-system processors and hardware supporting maximum bandwidth media center services including security termination and transcription, broadcast video to IP encapsulation, and multi-stream connected home IP content distribution.
• Featuring lower power and higher performance 40nm CMOS silicon technology, the BCM7422 supports a greener environment by reducing power requirements and integrates an intelligent power management processor to minimize STB power consumption.
• The BCM7422 is the industry's first STB SoC to feature the MPEG industry standard, SVC, that supports full-resolution HD 3DTV, and also enables a 40 percent bandwidth savings for backward-compatible 1080p60/50 sports content distribution to new and legacy STBs.
• With a separate and high performance (400 DMIPS) integrated MoCA home networking processor sub-system and available DLNA server/player software stack, service providers can easily support multi-room DVR services for five or more MoCA-based IP STB client devices enabling a simpler and cost effective home architecture that dramatically lowers capital costs.
• The BCM7422 also features a customized high performance (430MHz) VLIW (very long instructional word) DSP (digital signal processing) used mainly for audio processing. The DSP is also available to off-load the CPU for programming to support any video Codec and other miscellaneous signal processing applications.
• Supported by a broad array of time-to-market web-based connected home STB software applications including Adobe Flash® Platform for TV, Webkit HMTL 5.0, Java, Qt, DLNA 1.5, and DirectFB application libraries.
• Unique HD FastRTV channel change acceleration technology that improves channel change speeds by up to 500 percent.
• Supports the latest, advanced security and conditional access technologies including CableCard, Conax, DTCP-IP, Intertrust, Irdeto, Latens, Microsoft Playready®, Nagra, NDS, and Verimatrix.
• Broadcom's BCM7421 HD STB SoC includes the same functionality as the BCM7422, but does not integrate MoCA and is targeted to address non-MoCA deployments.

Source: http://www.broadcom.com/