Company

The world is rapidly transitioning to digital technology in the television, set top box and recorded video markets. This transition is leading to several commercial and technological discontinuities, presenting a substantial opportunity for semiconductor vendors to the television industry. Simultaneously, Internet growth, which is driving relentlessly higher bandwidths for data delivered via Internet Protocol (IP), continues to expand rapidly. According to InStat, broadband Internet access worldwide is growing from 30M subscribers in 2003 to 130M in 2008. With the increasing availability of broadband IP delivery, telecommunications companies (Telcos) and other Internet based video suppliers now have an opportunity to enter the television market, in direct competition with cable multi-service operators and the direct broadcast satellite industry. Concurrently, the rapid emergence of flat panel TV technology has added a further element of change to the industry.

In addition to this transition to digital technology, the television industry is experiencing another significant discontinuity: the transition from MPEG2 based video compression to the advanced video codec techniques of H.264 and VC-1. These latter two techniques enable the transmission of a similar quality image as seen in MPEG2, but use 50% to 67% less bandwidth. This means that a satellite provider, for example, that must work with a fixed bandwidth determined by the number of transponders on a satellite, can potentially double or even triple the number of channels transmitted using these advanced video CODECS. Similarly, a Telco, whose video transmission capacity is constrained by the relatively limited ADSL bandwidth, can now deliver MPEG2 quality video content in 1/2 or 1/3 the time required for equivalent MPEG2 video.

These factors, taken together, are causing change and an element of chaos to an industry that has not seen significant technical advances since the introduction of color TV in the 1950s. The implications for the technology required to support these changes are profound.

In situations where rapid market changes occur, the electronics industry has always gravitated toward implementing programmable platforms to enable rapid changes at the system level without altering the system hardware design.

The television industry has now reached this stage.

The digital video market has seen several attempts at building such programmable video platforms. These attempts have invariably been unsuccessful because the devices are expensive, difficult to program and provide inadequate performance. ASICs have prevailed—until now.

BrightScale was conceived in April of 2002 by an international team of engineers and scientists from academia and industry with established backgrounds in processor architecture, compiler design and digital video/still imaging.

BrightScale has developed a highly differentiated solution to address this problem of accelerating change and chaos.

By revisiting and revising previous video and media processor architecture mindsets, the BrightScale team realized that near-optimal performance and power efficiency can be attained, even for a purely programmable processor.

BrightScale’s BA 1024 is a powerful new processor architecture that provides full programmability, at a cost which is directly competitive at the device level, with ASIC solutions and the performance necessary to manage the demands of next generation multi-channel, multi-standard, high-definition video processing.

At the same time, the device is easy to program and follows the same model as is widely used for embedded processors and DSPs. BrightScale therefore has the programmable solution to meet the industry’s urgently growing needs.

The BrightScale brings to market for the first time a fully programmable device that can compete directly with fixed function ASIC solutions, in terms of performance and cost. This value proposition provides the opportunity for BrightScale to build leading market share in the highly evolving and growing Digital Television and Multi-media market.