Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Philips Chip Ups HDTV Ante

Ian Bell
By

The PNX1700 is designed to deliver unprecedented picture quality of streaming movies, news, digital photos and TV programs. It doubles the performance of previous generations while maintaining both hardware and software compatibility. Digital Connected Consumer devices enabled by the PNX1700 include IP set-top boxes, digital media adapters, personal video recorders, videophones and TVs.

Gartner Research predicts that by 2008, nearly one in three homes worldwide will have broadband Internet connection, supported by consumer demand for electronics and PC devices that can stream digital media content, such as broadcast television, movies, music and games. As a result of increasing demand for digital content, consumer electronics manufacturers are seeking media processors with the ideal combination of high performance and low cost.

Recommended Videos

“The technology offered by Nexperia media processors facilitates the delivery of high-quality digital content to consumers worldwide,” said Pat Romano, CTO and vice president of engineering at 2Wire. “As demand for digital content grows in the mainstream population, 2Wire looks forward to offering products which are powered by Nexperia and designed around the specific needs of the connected consumer.”

Related

The PNX1700 features a new 500MHz+ super-pipelined TriMedia CPU core, winner of the prestigious Best Media Processor award from Microprocessor Forum in 2004, based on its combination of high-performance and compatibility. It supports decoding of HD video formats, including Windows Media Video, DivX, MPEG-4 and MPEG-2. Furthermore, the PNX1700 can simultaneously encode and decode full D1 resolution MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video, making it ideal for personal video recorder applications. The PNX1700 also includes new instructions to optimize encoding and decoding of H.264 video, and it supports standard definition (SD) to HD up-conversion with advanced de-interlacing.

Pricing and availability

The PNX1700 is supported by a complete development package including hardware reference design, C-compiler, debugger, and extensive software codecs and applications software. The PNX1700 will sample to select customers in June, with volume production scheduled for Q3 2005. The PNX1700 is priced at USD $39 in volume.

eHomeupgrade.com rips off our connected home news – stop or you will hear from our attorneys.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Ian Bell
Ian Bell
Publisher
I work with the best people in the world and get paid to play with gadgets. What's not to like?
China’s enormous 500-meter radio telescope is up and running
china fast telescope open for business

China’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope is officially up and running, claims Xinhua, the country’s official state-run media channel. The enormous 500-meter FAST Radio Telescope is the world’s biggest filled-aperture radio telescope, and the overall second-largest single-dish aperture after Russia’s RATAN-600. It is located in Guizhou, Southwest China.

Short for Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope, FAST’s nickname is Tianyan, which translates as "Eye of the Sky" or "Eye of Heaven." The dish itself comprises close to 4,500 individual panels and boasts upward of 2,200 winches on its underside to help shape the surface to aim at different parts of the sky. Its existence reportedly expands by four times the volume of space range that radio telescopes can effectively explore. While only 300 meters of its diameter can be used at any one time, it nonetheless represents an enormous step forward for astronomy. It will be open to researchers from around the world.

Read more
Scientists come up with a method to make oxygen from moon dust
Artist impression of activities in a Moon Base.

The moon is covered in fine, delicate dust called regolith which sticks to absolutely everything and causes all sorts of technical problems. But it is an abundant resource, and plans for making use of it include melting it with lasers to use for 3D printing or packing it into bricks to build habitats. Now, the European Space Agency (ESA) has come up with a different use for the tricky substance: Turning it into oxygen which could be used by lunar explorers for breathing and for the production of fuel.

Moon regolith is known to contain about 40 to 50% oxygen by weight, but it is bound in the form of oxides so it's not immediately usable. Researchers at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) have been investigating ways to extract this oxygen using a technique called molten salt electrolysis. The regolith is placed in a metal basket along with molten calcium chloride salt and heated to a high temperature, then an electric current is passed through it so the oxygen can be extracted. A bonus of this method is that it also produces usable metal alloys as a by-product.

Read more
GuRu’s robot could charge up your devices wirelessly over a distance
GuRu wireless power over distance

This story is part of our continuing coverage of CES 2020, including tech and gadgets from the showroom floor.

Another day at CES 2020, another company ready to make the dream of wireless charging over distance a reality. This time around it was GuRu's turn to show us three demonstrations of wireless charging over distance working in different ways.

Read more