Ocean Blue to develop software for Toshiba 'Donau'

BRISTOL, ENGLAND: Digital TV software developer Ocean Blue Software will release its advanced TV software suite on Toshiba's TC9040x 'Donau' series of processors. The new Linux-based software will facilitate fast development of reduced component count consumer electronics products, such as set top boxes (STBs), integrated digital televisions (iDTVs), personal video recorders (PVRs), and combination hard disk/DVD recorder systems.

Ocean Blue is nearing completion of the development, which takes advantage of Toshiba's powerful, compact, and highly integrated ICs for 'free-to-air' (FTA) and Pay-TV digital television applications. Codenamed 'Donau', the TC90400XBG and TC90400FG high performance system-on-chip (SoC) devices simplify the design and dramatically reduce time to market.

"Ocean Blue is pleased to work with Toshiba and to broaden its support for the leading digital TV platforms and is pleased to announce support for Toshiba's Donau SoC," commented Ken Helps, managing director, Ocean Blue Software. "In addition to European requirements for Freeview Playback, support for high-definition decoding with display in half horizontal resolution and HD-to-SD conversion makes the new platform suitable for applications designed for use in the USA and Japan."

Toshiba's Donau platforms combine the company's media embedded processor (MeP) architecture with a 64-bit embedded RISC host processor to create multimedia SoCs with compute performances of up to 650MIPS (at 180MHz). The MeP architecture effectively frees the host processor from compute intensive DVB and multimedia processing tasks and allows designers to choose cost-optimized solutions for Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) applications. These applications can range from single-stream decoding, standard definition televisions to dual-stream decoding, high-end MHP (Multimedia Home Platform) and MHEG-5-based equipment.