Try an "immersive digital cinema" system with ultra-high definition (UD) technology and 3-D user-generated content, said Hyung Kyu Lim, chief executive of Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, an R&D arm of the South Korean electronics giant.

Powered by the Internet, next-generation TV will require a large-screen display of 80 inches or more. It will have 4096 x 2160 resolution at a frame rate of at least 60 frames per seconds, he said during a keynote address at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference here.

Digital content with such a display at 24 frames a second "requires around 300Mb/s for transmission when compressed using JPEG2000 adopted by DCI," he said in a paper. "Assuming an effective bandwidth allocated per household at around 100Mb/s using 1Gb/s Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH), it is apparent that a new innovative compression technology with three times more efficiency will be required."

The display itself must also undergo vast changes. As the UD "display has four times more pixels than HD display provides, new electrode materials are necessary for high-speed driving of pixels, and to overcome the reduced aperture ratio," he said.

One technology, 3-D content, will be an enabler. "With increasing complexity of photorealistic 3D-graphics rendering for virtual reality and UD-display processing in [next-generation] TV, the amount of computing power required tends to increase by two to four times," he said.

"For example, UD-display processing at 60f/s requires computing power on the order of 2400 GOPS," he said. "Such a level of computing power is not expected to be available before 2015, with typical ASIC design without specialized hardware."

A more viable solution is a multi-core processor, which could meet the requirement for UD-display at 60f/s in the 2012 timeframe, he added.