Boxing clever [Toshiba´s Unified Digital Architecture]

The author describes how Toshiba´s Unified Digital Architecture will enable the convergence of home entertainment and computing. The viable convergence platform combines the simplicity and reliability of consumer electronic (CE) appliances with a PC-like open extensible architecture optimised for the demands of A/V processing. Toshiba, a leading player in the CE appliance, PC and semiconductor industries, has formulated a proposal for a generic development platform for future-proof CE appliances designed expressly to satisfy these convergence criteria. The company has called its proposal the Unified Digital Platform (UDP). The UDP is designed to support a minimum set of common hardware components, comprising a RISC-based CPU, an MPEG -2 video decoder, an audio decoder (MPEG, Dolby), a graphics engine, a video interface, an audio interface and a network interface. Additional hardware components can be introduced to meet specific application requirements. Central to the UDP design is a data bus, the MM-bus (multimedia bus), designed to support data transfers between the system hardware components at rates consistent with the requirements of real-time A/V applications