Working under the auspices of the Technical Executive Experts Group (TEEG), approximately 200 engineers from all over China signed on to the Chinese HDTV program, and completed a functional prototype HDTV system that was tested successfully in trials last September. Now the team has about six months to get a permanent version running. And that's not the only job for the executive experts.

China has big plans for TEEG. Its ambitious agenda is to develop a national digital TV industry and to serve as a launching pad for other technological developments that officials hope will help make China a major player in the emerging world of intellectual property (IP).

Zhang Wenjun is project director of the Technical Executive Experts Group,
which officials hope will be China's springboard into the emerging world
of intellectual property. The first order of business for Zhang and his team
of 200: an HDTV system to broadcast China's National Day festivities in October.

"We indeed have been the core of Chinese HDTV technology, but we hope TEEG will be an open R&D center to generate the common technology [needed] for this industry," said Zhang Wenjun, TEEG's project director. "Most of the Chinese TV and system manufacturers are not strong enough to support these developing activities, so the best way is supporting, sponsoring and sharing new technology with a non-profit, independent institution."

The government's charge to have an HDTV system ready for the equivalent of China's Fourth of July has Zhang and his team giving their all to complete their work before the big day in October. Many of the young researchers have left their families and friends far from Beijing to work on the project day and night.

Success could mean that a prototype system might be ready in just two years, with less than a $2 million investment. That's less than many individual TV stations in the United States will spend to deploy a fully developed system that already has some infrastructure support.

Whether or not that enterprising goal is met, there's plenty of international interest in TEEG's efforts. Many institutions and companies here and abroad are eyeing the potentially huge Chinese digital TV market. Indeed, U.S. executives promoting the Advanced Television Standards Committee approach and European rivals promoting digital video broadcasting are visiting China often in hopes of persuading Chinese officials to adopt their respective specs.

As the contest between the U.S. and European camps heats up, chip makers have also begun exploring the Chinese HDTV market, which aims to be a national system that merges the advantages of both standards. IC makers have been coming to TEEG to demonstrate their encoders, decoders and other HDTV components.

Zhang and his young research team completed their prototype HDTV
system in two years. Now they have about six months, and a
shoestring budget, to get a permanent version up and running.

Some chip makers have told Zhang and his colleagues that they are willing to cooperate with TEEG to produce the application-specific standard products (ASSPs) that will be used in the Chinese HDTV broadcast system and receivers.

"China must use the mature technologies from advanced countries," Zhang acknowledged, including MPEG-2 video for source coding. "Another key factor is [that] we must establish intellectual-property rights [for] ourselves."

Homegrown IP

Indeed, Zhang and other Chinese engineers stress that IP rights are essential to the success of China's fledgling HDTV industry. "We must establish a system of home-built IP that [we] can cross-license to other countries and use to decrease the cost [of] other technologies," said Zhang, who also serves as an engineering professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University. Otherwise, potential Chinese HDTV developers will remain only assemblers and "royalties will be a barrier for the whole industry, delaying the business for both local and overseas suppliers," he said.

The race among the United States, Europe and Japan for HDTV supremacy encouraged industry leaders in China to step up research activities in 1994. The initiative meant many older scientists and engineers were replaced by younger researchers with experience in both HDTV technology and in managing a technical team.

Zhang immediately surfaced as an ideal candidate to head the HDTV effort.

Zhang described himself in a recent interview as a veteran of the emerging Chinese HDTV industry based on his 10 years' experience in the field. After earning a doctorate from Shanghai Jiaotong University's Institute of Image Processing and Pattern Recognition in 1990, he contacted several communications and consumer-electronics giants seeking a spot for post-doctoral research. Philips Communications Industrie AG (Nuremberg, Germany), a subsidiary of U.S.-based Lucent Technologies Inc., accepted Zhang's application, and assigned him initially to work on improving image-encoding technology used on PDH communications systems.

Since PDH is a mixed-signal system, clock shifts raised problems in its coding functions. Zhang's director gave him three months to solve the problem without making too many changes to the system overall. After two weeks, Zhang completed a new algorithm that was better than his director expected. Indeed, it eventually led to his first German patent.

The work gave Zhang practical experience finding technical solutions under tight deadlines.

For his contribution, Zhang was tapped for the core research team for HD-MAC, the European first-generation HDTV system. He joined the project's encoder research team and later joined HD-Divine, the second-generation digital HDTV effort. By the time Zhang left Germany in 1993 to return to Shanghai, he had earned four patents.

He worked in Shanghai as a professor and researcher during the next 18 months. "The R&D [process is] quite different between a Western institution and a Chinese college," Zhang observed. "I am very lucky to experience and learn from both of them. The management methodologies I [learned] in Germany taught me efficiency, quality control and engineering-to-production" skills.

On the other hand, he continued, "The open atmosphere in college [in China] is very important to breed new ideas, and it's easy to find new blood for research in college." But graduate researchers eventually leave for other institutions, often bringing research projects to a complete halt until the researchers are replaced, he added.

Therefore, Zhang said, the ideal R&D model should combine the capabilities of China's professional institutes, universities and its emerging high-tech industry. That is what TEEG and China's HDTV project are trying to forge — and why the effort is different from traditional Chinese research projects. In the past, government ministries often let institutes, universities and industry labs work separately.

Core crew

Zhang and two graduate students from Shanghai Jiaotang University joined forces in Beijing with 10 other engineers in February 1996. The team became the main researchers on the HDTV prototype effort as well as coordinators of nine technical subgroups.

The subgroups now focus on video and audio encoding, multiplexing, channel encoding for VSB and OFDM, tuners, source decoding and transmitters. A total of 200 engineers from nine colleges and institutes are working on those technologies.

To keep things moving on schedule and to maintain standards of quality, Zhang and his TEEG colleagues signed agreements with the heads of the institutions involved in developing the HDTV prototype. Zhang said he frequently checks the agreements to ensure his group is following its guidelines.

He managed to keep all but one subgroup on schedule — indeed, the rest finished their work ahead of schedule. Each is expected to generate dozens of patents stemming from development of the HDTV prototype.

Despite last fall's successful terrestrial trial, Zhang agreed that the prototype system remains at least three to five years behind the European and U.S. systems.

"The system runs on FPGAs and other ASICs, so we shall improve it by developing some key ASSPs," the project leader explained. "The display device, receiver, camera and recorder are the other limitations to a [mature] HDTV technology and industry" in China.

Foreign vendors and design houses have meanwhile shown an interest in pitching in to build the system, along with supplying hardware and software components. Zhang said cooperation will help China narrow the gap with other nations. He said he believes it will also help close the gap between China's engineering community and designers in other countries by serving as a training ground.

"The prototype system works as a test platform for formulating Chinese DTV standards, forming industry production [capabilities] and training engineers," Zhang said.

Role for software

For now, Zhang said he expects software to play a key role in China's shift to HDTV. The Chinese HDTV standard will include an advanced, embedded operating system from among local and overseas software suppliers. He is investigating the possibility of cooperation in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows CE-based Venus Plan, announced in March, which aims to deliver data services to homes via TV sets. Other vendors are also being considered.

"We shall probably not develop an operating system by ourselves, but the developer should let [us] know its system well," he said. "We also shall not develop application software alone, so we shall pay much attention [to] middleware."

More government agencies and other enterprises in China are watching Zhang's group to see how it fares in developing a system that will televise an important national anniversary. Despite the attention, Zhang said TEEG should remain a nonprofit and independent research group. "We hope that everyone will harvest [the industrial benefits] of our fruits as soon as possible," he said.