Set-top boxes are bringing radical and exciting features to revolutionize the living room experience. Spartan-II FPGAs are at the heart of enabling these new and exciting technologies. One such feature is the capability to store video on hard disk drives (HDD). This allows viewers to simultaneously record and view television programs, as well the ability to perform instant replays, pause live T.V. and automatically record favorite programs.

Spartan-II FPGAs are feature rich to provide the control logic and data buffer to interface to the HDD. Since, this is a very new technology, the interface standards to these new HDDs is still evolving. Unlike, the PC industry, there is no single commonly used interface standard. Using the reprogrammability nature of Xilinx FPGAs allows set-top manufacturers to very quickly adopt to new and enhanced interface standards.

Spartan-II FPGAs are also used to optimize set-top box designs to support hard disk drives from various hard disk drive manufacturers. This provides the ability to dual source multiple types of HDDs from various disk drive manufacturers. The Spartan-II FPGA can be programmed late in the manufacturing cycle, this overcomes HDD availability issues, as well as inventory reduction, resulting in lower total cost of ownership.