Chip technology of smart TV

(1) High integration and multi-core are the mainstream

Smart TV needs not only to complete the decoding and display function of traditional TV, but also to run the operating system and many applications. Therefore, both aspects of chip design should be taken into account. Smart TV chips mainly have two design schemes: single chip and dual chip. The early design was mainly based on two chips, that is, the "1+1" scheme of one TV board and one Android board. The interface part was still handled by the TV SOC chip, while the application of intelligent operating system, network and other applications was completed through microprocessors. Although TV manufacturers can use the dual chip scheme to design their own smart TV products and improve users' intelligent application experience, the high cost is not conducive to the promotion of smart TV.

Domestic smart TV chips are mainly single-chip. The single-chip scheme has cost advantages on the one hand, and reduces the difficulty of smart TV design and research and development on the other hand. The single chip includes two parts: processor and video codec. The processor part is responsible for application running, web browsing and so on. The video coding and decoding part is mainly based on the image processing engine, combined with the algorithm that meets the broadcast signal standard to complete the video coding and decoding work.

(2) Arm architecture takes advantage

At the beginning of the development of smart TV in 2010, the CPU architecture included arm, x86 and MIPs. Two years later, the market situation changed significantly.

X86 architecture products have occupied all the personal computer processor market, most of the IT server processor market, and a large part of the supercomputer processor market. However, with its powerful computing performance, x86 architecture will still have opportunities in the future smart TV market. After all, unlike mobile phones, TVs require much less power consumption and heat dissipation than mobile phones.