ZL10321

• Single Chip solution for Digital Terrestrial Personal Video Recorder (PVR) Products
• Supports Simultaneous 'Pause & Resume' and 2nd-channel recording
• PVR controller providing bitstream multiplexing, PID filtering and record/playback control.
• Dual on-chip DVB-T COFDM demodulators with Forward Error Correction.
• IDE interface
• MPEG-2 Audio & Video decoder
• PowerPC 405TM CPU Core with 16k/16k cache, Memory manager and Virtual memory system
• Dual SDRAM controller
• 6 Video DACs on-chip, for Composite (CVBS) or Component (RGB, YPrPb) Analog Video
• Twin PAL/NTSC DENCs
• I2S Digital Audio Input
• I2S and S/PDIF Digital Audio outputs
• DVB-CI Common Interface (CI) control and bitstream interfaces
• Conditional Access (CA) DVB-descrambler
• Smart Card Interface
• Inputs for external MPEG-2 Transport Streams, allowing support for external demodulators (e.g. Cable TV, Satellite TV)
• External Modem support interface
• Infrared & UART interface
• Linux-based Software Development Kit (SDK)
• Low Power (<1.4W Typical, in full operation)
• Low Application Component Count
• Small Footprint applications
• Supports MacrovisionTM Copy Protection -  (ZL10321 only; Macrovision license holders only)
• Dolby^® Digital Decoding - (ZL10321 only; Dolby^® Digital* license holders only - *awaiting certification)
• Ideal solution for UK Freeview services

The ZL10321 is a DVB-T PVR-on-a-Chip solution which enables the rapid development of cost effective and feature-rich DVB-T based Personal Video Recorders (PVR). To achieve this, Zarlink has integrated two DVB-T compliant COFDM demodulators, an MPEG-2 audio/video decoder, a PVR controller and a full suite of set-top box/iDTV interfaces together with a high performance CPU into a single System-on-a-Chip (SoC) solution.

The ZL10321's PVR Controller can sustain the simultaneous transfer of three MPEG-2 Transport Streams with a hard disk drive, permitting, for example, simultaneous recording of two TV Channels and playing-back a third; essentially three VCRs in a box. The key capability of PVR technology is the ability to live-pause and time-shift live broadcast television, where a recorded stream can be played back before its recording has completed. The ZL10321 supports this function, and in addition allows the simultaneous recording of a second digital channel. This is made possible by high-performance on-chip DMA controllers, which transfer bitstreams between the PVR Controller, SDRAM and IDE Hard Disk(s) efficiently, with minimum CPU overhead.

PVR functionality places considerable demand on the software environment, which necessitates that such systems are based on robust multitasking operating systems, supporting virtual memory and memory management. Linux, with its wide range of capabilities is ideally suited for such applications. Consequently the ZL10321 uses the  ighperformance PowerPC 405 RISC processor, which fully supports the requirements of the Linux Operating System.

The ZL10321 is able to share a common Linux Code base at the device driver, middleware and application layers with the entry-level ZL10310/ZL10311/ZL10321 solutions, which are also available from Zarlink Semiconductor.

Also available is the ZL10321 DVB-T PVR-on-a-Chip, which additionally offers Dolby Digital1 multi-channel audio decoding, and MacrovisionTM Copy Protection for applications requiring Dolby Audio and Pay TV services.