As expected, the major focus of consumer electronics manufacturers at CES this year has been on HDTV displays, recording devices and accessories, not terrestrial DTV tuners. That doesn't mean manufacturers are ignoring over-the-air TV, if only because the FCC has set deadlines for including DTV tuners in sets with screens above a certain size. ATI Technologies, which bought 8-VSB receiver chip pioneer Nxtwave, was one of the companies pushing terrestrial DTV solutions.
The ATI XILLEON line of chips gives set manufacturers a simple, low cost way to add HDTV capability to TV products. Announcing its XILLEON 210VC chip at CES, ATI said it was the "world's first digital terrestrial and Cable Plug-and-Play Television-on-Chip." The chip includes demodulators for ATSC VSB, digital cable QAM, forward data channel QPSK, analog NTSC video and analog BTSC stereo audio as well as conditional access control, demultiplexers; an HD MPEG-2 video decoder, digital audio decoder; scalers and deinterlacers for HDTV and VCR output. Peripheral support includes USB, flash memory, DVI/HDMI and IEEE-1394 connectivity. A lower cost version of the chip is available for over-the-air ATSC and "in-the-clear" digital cable QAM signals where Cable Plug-and-Play support isn't required. See the ATI press releaseXILLEON 210VC lowers the cost of integrating high quality digital reception into TVs.
Several major TV tuner manufacturers will be using ATI THEATER 310 and THEATER 313 NTSC, ATSC and QAM receiver chips. See the ATI press releases for information about agreements with Matsushita Electronics, LG Innotek, and ALPS Electric.
