Broadcom shows off Connected Home

TO ILLUSTRATE how its chips are finding their way inside virtually every media related appliance in the Connected Home, Broadcom showed off its products at the IPTV World Forum 2007 in London. Luckily there were no toasters on display.

Broadcom had a wide range of its reference designs on display including, naturally, several set-top box designs. Curiously the company didn't mention its 65 nanometer Broadcom BCM7400B dual-channel video decoder chip it had launched that day.

The most crucial claim was made by Gordon Lindsay, product manager for WLAN with Broadcom. He pointed out that only a month ago the IEEE had finally approved an 802.11n specification. This'll be known as 802.n version 1.10.

Lindsay claimed there was no rush to be the first out with full spec version 1.10 chips, since there were only a few minor tweaks to be made to existing offerings which are generally referred to as 'DraftN' products.

Indeed he claimed Broadcom based products were already interworking with rival 802.11n products and its chips were already in retail through Buffalo and Linksys products. There should be an 802.11n version of BT's Home Hub out soon too.

Other reference designs which Broadcom was keen to promote included the MCM2820 which combines its Videocore technology with an ARM11 processor on one chip.

Potential uses for such a chip include personal video recorders (PVR). Indeed Broadcom was showing off a PVR device which already incorporates its chips - the V-Mate from San Disk.

This is already in UK retail for around £65 and takes DVD / VCR / HDD content and records it onto a vast array of memory card formats. So, for example, you could record from a set-top box and play back on a Nokia phone.

So while there was nothing dramatically new, it was the first time products from five different Broadcom units were simultaneously on display. µ

L'INQ
Broadcom