Mirics launches TV decoding on GPU

LONDON — Mirics Semiconductor Ltd. (Fleet, England) has announced the launch of a multi-standard broadcast TV decoder that uses a Cuda-based graphics add-in-card for computational acceleration.

USmart Electronic Products Ltd. (Hong Kong, China) has developed a TV receiver using the FlexiTV software modem from Mirics integrated with Inno3D-branded graphics boards from ASK Technology Group Ltd. (Hong Kong, China) The Inno3D boards are based on GeForce graphics processing chips from Nvidia Corp.

Mirics announced it had got its FlexiTV software stack running on Cuda and that the technology was ready for implementation on specific graphics add-in cards in September 2009. Mirics also supplies the MSi3101 silicon-to-USB analog front-end chip.

Cuda is a parallel-programming initiative that uses the parallelism of GPUs to run software other than graphics rendering. FlexiTV offers a software-reconfigurable platform to receive free-to-air terrestrial TV regardless of regional variations. The Mirics approach off-loads certain algorithms to the Nvidia graphics chip.

The result is the world's first software-based global TV receiver that enables GPU-based integration, Mirics claimed. Initial products, being launched this quarter, will target regions widely served by the DVB-T and ISDB-T digital TV standards.

The integration is achieved through a daughter-card that attaches to a graphics add-in card combined with software drivers that enable regional broadcast standards. USmart is delivering the daughter-card.

"Launching this GPU-accelerated solution presents a terrific opportunity for consumers to not only add great graphics power to their systems, but get instant access to live TV in time for some of the great sporting events coming this summer," said Ben Wong, CEO of USmart, in a statement issued by Mirics.

"Integrating broadcast TV to Inno3D GPU products is a terrific addition that appeals to our customers," said Matthew Ho, engineering director of ASK Technology, in the same statement. "Being first to bring this capability to market and taking advantage of the power of the Nvidia Cuda architecture to accelerate the Mirics solution made FlexiTV the perfect complement to our existing products."

"The flexibility of software-based TV and ability to leverage the processing power of the GPU make this a must-have upgrade for consumers seeking not only the best in graphics realism but also to access live digital broadcast TV on their desktop PC," said Jay Nunez, Vice President of WW Sales and Marketing, Mirics.