Saankhya Labs: One Receiver For Multiple TV Standards

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Written by Cholena Deb

Tuesday, 16 September 2008 00:00

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You can't use a television manufactured for India in the United States because both countries employ different television broadcast technology standards. This difference has been around since the days of analogue standards and persists to this day. But Saankhya Labs could change that with its innovative product.

Different countries use different television broadcast technology standards. In the United States, the NTSC (national television system committee) standard is used to define analogue television requirements. More recently, it is the ATSC (advanced television systems committee) standard that defines digital broadcast technology. The rest of the world uses PAL (phase alternating line) and SECAM (sequential colour with memory) analogue standards with several sub-variants. DVB-T (digital video broadcasting terrestrial) is the digital television broadcast standard used by the world, except by the USA, and is very dissimilar to ATSC.

There are a number of technical differences between NTSC, PAL and SECAM that make it impossible to design TV receivers that can accommodate all these standards in one hardware design. Consumer electronics manufacturers bear the brunt of these complexities, as they have to develop completely different television receiver designs for different countries or regions, thus cutting down their chances of exploiting a vast market with a specific design.

The power of Pruthvi

But all this might be about to change. Saankhya Labs, a fabless semiconductor company that develops digital communication integrated circuits (ICs), has created a new product, Pruthvi, which claims to rectify this problem.

Pruthvi is an IC that is capable of demodulating signals compatible with multiple standards in a digital TV and set-top box. Current demodulator ICs are capable of demodulating signals compatible with a single standard like ATSC or DVB-T. This compels TV manufacturers to design region-specific TVs resulting in higher design, manufacturing and inventory costs. But Pruthvi is based on a programmable architecture and helps TV manufacturers drastically reduce all these costs. Based on a new technology called software defined radios (SDR), Pruthvi employs demodulation standards like ATSC, DVB-T and J.83.

Traditionally, demodulator chips are designed in a hardwired architecture, which is, by definition, inflexible. But Pruthvi is based on an innovative programmable platform, designed to optimally implement demodulation algorithms. Standard programmable platforms do not scale well for a specific application in terms of area and power.

"We have unified demodulating standards like ATSC, DVB-T and others. As far as our knowledge goes, nobody has attempted this before in the consumer electronics segment. The reason could be that most engineers think that these standards are as different as chalk and cheese and their unification is not possible. At a superficial level, they are right; but deep down there are a lot of similarities and it is the similarities that we have captured and expressed in our architecture," says Vishwa Kayargadde, CEO and co-founder, Saankhya Labs.

Pruthvi is still under development, and is expected to be released to digital television (DTV) manufacturers by mid-2009.

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