Symbionics, the Cambridge, UK-based electronics design house, says it expects the digital TV market to account for half its revenues next year. At last week’s Cable & Satellite show in London, it went public about the digital TV design work it has carried out for Toshiba, Sony Semiconductor and Matsushita Electronic Components. Symbionics also announced that it has been retained by British Digital Broadcasting (BDB) to advise on the specification and implementation of open software standards for UK digital terrestrial TV. Symbionics, which offers design services for set-top boxes, digital TV sets and wireless telecoms products, was acquired by US electronics design company Cadence in March 1998. For Toshiba, Symbionics developed a digital terrestrial TV set-top box which decodes both free-to-air and pay TV services. The DVB-1 box includes Toshiba’s RISC-based Hawk microprocessor. Toshiba is one of the approved set-top box suppliers for the 15-channel digital terrestrial TV service which BDB is to roll out this autumn. Symbionics also worked with Sony Semiconductor to design a set-top box reference platform for digital cable, satellite and terrestrial transmissions. The platform is claimed to be the first to include the DVB Common Interface function, and supports third party development tools for ARM’s RISC chips. For Matsushita, Symbionics designed a network interface module for digital terrestrial TV. The de-modulator uses Matsushita’s OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) tuner and the Motorola COFDM chipset.
