EETimes.com - SkyTune aims to outfit PCs for TV reception

FREMONT, Calif. — Semiconductor vendor Auravision has changed its name and product strategy. Now called SkyTune, the company plans to offer analog- and digital-TV receiver and datacast solutions on PC architectures.

The changes reflect shifting market realities. Auravision's traditional product line — video overlay and scaling chips — was losing ground to competing chips that had begun integrating those functions. "We began to change our product vision, placing a new focus on digital receivers on the PC. That gave birth to SkyTune," said Richard Johnson, the company's president and chief executive, adding that the company intends "to become a one-stop shop for video and data solutions."

First out of the chute is the SKY951VP chip, which is slated for launch today (July 19). The chip has a digital transport stream interface for QPSK, VSB or QAM demodulators; an NTSC/PAL/Secam analog video decoder; and a PCI bus interface.

SkyTune will avoid the already crowded market for such media-processing chips as MPEG decoders, on the assumption that such functions will be the domain of the host processor. It will focus instead on such communications chips as quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) and vestigial sideband (VSB) demodulators. It also plans to integrate essential blocks, including conditional access for content decryption and such bus-interface bridges as PCI, Device Bay and Universal Serial Bus.

The company is in its second round of financing now and hopes to raise $10 million, much of which will be spent on licensing intellectual property, contracting outside design teams and shoring up internal engineering resources, to a planned head count of 36 by year's end. Mike Noonen, SkyTune's vice president of sales and marketing, said the company's combined expertise in video processing and PC architecture should help it capture a market to which few other media-processing chip companies are paying attention.

OEM, retail targets

Though the jury's still out on how high the demand for PC-enabled TV tuners will be, Sean Badding, senior analyst at Carmel Group (Carmel, Calif.), said SkyTune is shipping "the right product at the right time to stake its claim" for an emerging market. The SKY951VP puts the company "in a good position to take advantage of the broadband media and Internet explosion," he said.

SkyTune hopes the chip will appeal to both PC OEMs and add-in card retailers looking for low-cost TV-tuner implementations. The part offers both DTV and analog TV capabilities. It passes uncompressed digital video, audio and data streams to a PCI bus and can pass digital video streams to a video input port for VGA cards. Because it contains analog NTSC, PAL and Secam decoders, it can be designed into analog tuner cards.

"We are essentially eliminating the need for a separate NTSC decoder, a PCI bridge chip and several glue logic chips," Johnson said.

The chip is sampling now and will cost $12 each in quantities of 100,000. SkyTune partner Samsung Semiconductor fabricates the device on a 0.35-micron process and contributed the chip's video-decoder technology.

Noonen said analog TV tuner cards will be the largest initial application but added that the chip will "open up an opportunity to enable a home PC to cache TV programs as well as broadband Web information onto its hard-disk drive. With the price of 10- to 16-Gbyte drives falling, the combination of tuner and disk-drive technologies could make [the ability to download] TV programming onto a PC a low-cost way of attracting consumers."

But Carmel Group's Badding raised a red flag: the lack of processing power in today's sub-$1,000 PCs. Without sufficient host processing power to decode broadband information, he warned, SkyTune's chip may not be very useful.