Junko Yoshida

EE Times

(09/12/2005 9:57 AM EDT)

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Pace Micro Technology (West Yorkshire, U.K.) unveiled a mobile personal video recorder (PVR) prototype based on the DVB-H, mobile TV standard. The mobile PVR shown at the International Broadcast Conference (IBC) here received a live DVB-H stream.

While mobile handset manufacturers plan to leverage DVB-H to bring TV to cellphones, Pace Micro is using the emerging mobile TV standard to add mobility, terrestrial digital TV reception and storage capabilities to its handheld PVR.

The mobile PVR, equipped with a 4.3-inch color display, runs on Nucleus, a very lightweight real-time operating system. It is driven by Broadcom Corp.’s BCM2702, a multimedia chip capable of decoding H.264, and DVB-H technology from Sony SRS (Semiconductor & Electronic Solutions Europe), said Peter Simpson, chief technologist at Pace Micro.

The BCM2702 multimedia chip, featuring a DSP core originally developed by Alphamosaic, acquired last year by Broadcom, supports mobile TV and H.264. The BCM2702 is already shipping in a number of handsets.

Pace Micro chose Broadcom’s chip because “it is about the only advanced codec IC designed for low power applications” among many set top/PVR decoder solutions on the market, Simpson said.

The device, called PDH400, features a maximum drive capacity of 40 gigabytes. It can also store streaming H.264 in an SD memory card. Pace has made no final decision about whether to support in the PDH400 both storage devices or support only the solid memory card. “As the price of flash memory goes down, we may decide to offer just a memory card,” said Simpson. A 2-gigabyte SD card, for example, is enough to store 10 hours of H.264 video, he added,

Pace Micro hopes to roll out enough units of the PDH400 to enable trials in the first quarter of 2006, said Simpson.