The public's fascination with the Internet has become such an unstoppable force that designers of consumer appliances such as TVs, and stereos have decided they can no longer afford to ignore the phenomenon.

As a result, a number of companies sprang up in Silicon Valley (and elsewhere) this year to help consumer electronics companies design and deliver such Internet links. In the forefront are such companies as WebTV Networks Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.) and Diba Inc. (Menlo Park, Calif.). Also right there is a chipless chip company, iReady Corp. (San Jose, Calif.), whose mission is to offer both consumer system companies and silicon vendors what it labels an Internet Tuner in the form of a reusable off-the-shelf design core.

But the first to hit the mass market this year, and perhaps the one that offers the best laid-out Web box, is WebTV Networks. That outfit has developed a reference design platform for a Web-surfing set-top, and has built its business around one simple concept: the marriage of the Internet and television.

It has quickly succeeded in convincing two world-class consumer electronics giants, Sony Corp. and Philips Electronics, to sign on to the idea. Both Philips and Sony acknowledged that they chose to work with WebTV over others for two reasons: its ready-to-deploy technologies and its online service, which provide a complete Internet-access solution. The upshot is that WebTV boxes from the two companies are storming the consumer market this Christmas season.

For conventional TV manufacturers that feel increasingly threatened by the invasion of multimedia PCs into the digital living room, a Net surfing box that could sit atop the TV is a very tempting proposition. In their eyes, as Philips senior vice president Edward Volkwein put it, this could be the alternative to PCs for those 40 million households without PCs.

Distinguishing Web-TVs from similar attempts by its competitors are three features. First, commercial products built on the WebTV reference design are already here, sold through retail outlets. Second, the company has identified the imperative that computer graphics on the Web must be displayed on TV in a visually attractive form. Third, it does see that the success of WebTV boxes depends on appropriate network-access technologies, perhaps more than what goes inside the box itself.

Diba appears to hold an equally strong position in terms of the company's foundation technology as well as its list of licensees. That includes Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., NEC Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. and Zenith Corp.; all are planning to launch various forms of Internet boxes based on Diba's software platform. Still, because none of those licensees has a product out the door, it is hard to judge the potential of the company's technology.

As far as hardware is concerned, what goes inside any generic Web-surfing box is fairly straightforward. It consists of a microprocessor, a custom ASIC, a modem chip and memory.

For example, the WebTV box, in its reference design, runs on Integrated Device Technology Inc.'s R4640 Orion RISC CPU at 118 MHz, which is based on the MIPS engine with enhanced DSP capabilities.

The set of software technologies developed for WebTV includes an ability to translate computer graphics into D1-class, digital-studio-quality 4:2:2 video output. The WebTV-designed custom ASIC is designed to support WebTV-developed image-enhancement technology to eliminate interlace flicker, as well as WebTV's on-the-fly image-decompression technology to minimize memory consumption. The ASIC also supports other graphics and sound as well as JPEG, MPEG-1 and -2 decompression.

The box also features Rockwell's two-chip modem ICs, offering 33.6-kbit/second V.34bis modem capability. The next step for integration is to port modem capability to DSP capabilities on the R4640, according to Bruce Leak, chief operating officer and executive vice president of engineering at WebTV. Memory configuration in the box is designed to allow very fast video and includes 2 Mbytes of SGRAM, 1-Mbyte Flash ROM for upgradable software and 2 Mbytes of Mask ROM. The machine employs no operating system, but a real-time kernel designed by WebTV is supplied on the ROM. The box also comes with a 32-bit bus extension for future peripheral connectivity.

Where WebTV's strategies truly shine is in offering not only a cost-effective design for a set-top, but also providing a subscription-based online service for its set-top users. By offering its own cached Internet service, WebTV tries to minimize one of the biggest obstacles to growth of the product: slow and unreliable network connections caused by a lack of bandwidth or peak usage on the server end.

WebTV developed Trans-Cache technology, which caches, transcodes, reformats, streams and reorders Web-site data for optimal download to its device. It also signed up Concentric Network (Cupertino, Calif.) as the first Internet service provider for WebTV's television-based Internet network service.

For its part, Diba introduced a new embedded system platform called Interactive Digital Electronic Appliances (IDEA). A family of hardware reference designs the startup has developed for new IDEA applications include: Diba Internet for Web browsing; Diba Mail, offering an e-mail, fax and phone in a single package; Diba Kitchen, featuring a CD player, TV, recipe search, menu planner and nutritional information, all in one.

At the heart of the company's invention lies a lightweight application software runtime technology, called Diba Application Foundation. The runtime software-as big as 350 kbytes-sits on top of a pSOS-based microkernel to provide robust applications optimized for any IDEA products. "By using our software technology, one can build an integrated e-mail/fax/telephone device that can run with only 1 Mbyte of memory," said J. Stuart Read, vice president of market development.

Diba plans to license its software technology to both consumer electronics manufacturers and information service providers, but has no plans to manufacture its own hardware products. The company is solely focused on developing complete hardware reference designs "that can let any consumer electronics manufacturer design and build such a new appliance very quickly," Read said.

Interesting Twist

Adding an interesting twist to the race, iReady is introducing Internet Tuner, a product that makes handhelds, phones, TVs and other consumer devices Internet-ready at low cost and low power. More specifically, the Internet Tuner receives and processes Net data coming from a physical transport interface of a system, interprets and successively parses it only when needed, and distributes and displays it on the fly.

The Internet Tuner is offered as a design for a silicon module, to be integrated with other functions.

Ryo Koyama, president and chief operating officer of iReady, believes that "what consumer-electronics companies are looking for is not network computers or Web boxes, but a highly reliable, easy-to-manufacture method of adding Internet connectivity to their existing products." Koyama added, "We are offering them a dedicated point solution for Internet connection."

By going one layer deeper onto silicon than a set-top box design, Koyama believes that implementing the Internet Tuner in consumer-electronics devices offers advantages over PC-based Internet solutions, mainly in the area of power consumption, memory and processing power requirements.

Source: Electronic Engineering Times