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.