ginngi engineering

A settop box for receiving video DVB streams over an IP connection was implemented by combining existing settop box chips with discrete Ethernet technology. (This design was implemented before standard IPTV devices became available). The design consisted of the baseboard, the enclosure, embedded Linux OS, device drivers and streaming software for storage and playback.

The hardware board consisted of a settop box chipset from IBM (Vulcan), a 100BASE-T Ethernet interface, video/audio interfaces, and various power supplies and regulators. Because this was a consumer product, with cost being a critical parameter, the layout had to be performed using no more than four layers.

When we started the project the settop box software was using VxWorks OS. Our first job was to convert the software base to an embedded Linux OS, which significantly reduced product cost and improved development of applications software. Custom device drivers were written to interface to the hard disk and a special hard disk manager was designed for efficient streaming of video to the disk.