Overview

Digital TV refers to the transmission of a broadcast signal by encoding it as zeroes and ones to provide new and higher quality services. It offers an amazing multimedia experience while providing access to Internet, voice and video across the same medium. Digital television provides crystal clear, "snow-free" and sharper cinema-like pictures with CD-quality sound to all TVs that can receive a minimum level signal. It can be compressed to provide multiple channels (up to 5 channels per program) in the same bandwidth required for one channel of NTSC television (the current standard).

This scheme allows transmission of TV programs in wide screen, high resolution formats known as HDTV (high definition TV) and SDTV (standard definition TV) format providing significantly better color performance than existing analog TV systems. It will be used by more than 1600 broadcast TV stations in the US. Broadcasters have the ability to simultaneously transmit multiple video programs using a single TV channel - simultaneously delivering digital data services with TV and audio programming such as publications (local electronic newspaper), program schedules, computer software, specific product information, email and Internet.

Market Research

According to the International Data Corporation’s (IDC) analysis, the total U.S. unit shipment of DTVs will increase from 570K units to 5.57M from the year 2000 to 2004. Per the same analysis, the total US unit shipment of analog TVs will decrease from 28M to 24M from the year 2000 to 2004.

Different DTV Technologies:

The different DTV technologies are: plasma display panels (PDPs), liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and digital light processor (DLPs).

Market Trends

While DTV holds the promise to enhance your multimedia experience, there continue to be conflicts over broadcasting standards. This however does not allow for rapid product deployment since the market is not decided over standards. But not being able to build products and in lieu of a particular standard being accepted may lock customers out of the market for an entire product cycle.

Xilinx Solutions

The Xilinx Spartan-II programmable logic solutions offer the flexibility to build products that can be reprogrammed in the field at costs far below any programmable solution. Please view the presentation to see how Xilinx solutions can help you build products for this fast evolving market place.