Architecture, Design, and Verification of an 18 Million Transistor Digital Television and Media Processor Chip

Abstract

This paper describes the architecture, functionality, and design of NX-2700 — a digital television (DTV) and media-processor chip from Philips Semiconductors. NX-2700 is the second generation of an architectural family of programmable multimedia processors that supports all eighteen United States Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) [1] formats and is targeted at the high-end DTV market. NX-2700 is a programmable processor with a very powerful, generalpurpose Very LongInstruction Word (VLIW) Central ProcessingUnit (CPU) core that implements many non-trivial multimedia algorithms, coordinates all on-chip activities, and runs a small real-time operating system. The CPU core, aided by an array of autonomous multimedia coprocessors and input-output units with Direct Memory Access (DMA) capability, facilitates concurrent processingof audio, video, graphics, and communication-data.