An Integrated Platform for Digital Consumer Electronics

This paper describes the architecture of an integrated platform developed for improving the development efficiency of system LSIs built into digital consumer electronics equipment such as flat-panel TVs and optical disc recorders. The reason for developing an integrated platform is to improve the development efficiency of system LSIs that serve the principal functions of the said equipment. The key is to build a common interface between each software layer, with the system LSI located at the lowest layer. To make this possible, the hardware architecture of the system LSI is divided into five blocks according to its main functionality. In addition, a middleware layer is placed over the operating system to improve the ease of porting old applications and developing new applications in the higher layer. Based on this platform, a system LSI called UniPhierTM has been developed and used in 156 product families of digital consumer electronics equipment (as of December 2008). key words: platform, system LSI, consumer electronics, video codec