LOS ANGELES — To demonstrate its technology prowess and devotion to residential gateway development, Philips came to the Western Show this week and quietly showed off an advanced home server system. Behind closed curtains, Philips revealed the "central gateway" system to a handful of select U.S. customers and cable operators.
The feature-rich prototype, developed under a project code-named "Rooster," runs on two TriMedia processors. It sports three TV tuners to watch, send and record video. It has connections to the Internet, wireless IP telephony, and full infrared and Bluetooth-based home networking systems.
The server, with 16 Mbytes of RAM, a DVD player/recorder, CD recorder and a 27-gigabytes hard-disk drive, can be operated by voice. A fingerprint recognition system embedded in its small touch screen-based remote control unit communicates the fingerprint information to the home server, which then can identify the user. Presumably, that information would enable the server to offer a so-called "profiled-based service" by sorting out the user's preferred music and video selections to make navigation easier.
"This is to give an idea to service operators what a central gateway system can do for our home," said Greg Pine, senior technology strategist at Philips Digital Networks (Eindhoven, Netherlands).
The central gateway system is still only a concept, said Pine. But the integration of a broadband receiver, a home network system and a variety of storage systems in one large shiny box is attractive to system vendors and service operators, if they're eyeing average consumers, he said.
Multifaceted platform
In the Dutch giant's live demonstration, the central gateway system let a consumer use wireless IP telephony as well as watch, record and playback video programs. The system allowed another user in a separate room to wirelessly download an MP3 file through a Bluetooth-based RF home network, offering 720-kilobit/second pay load. The system let the user not only listen to the music, but to remotely record it on the gateway system's CD recorder in a separate room. While listening to the MP3 music file, the user was allowed to simultaneously surf the Web on a wireless tablet-based computer cradled on his lap.
Philips designed and built the system in Eindhoven. It's showing marked the first time Philips had brought a prototype out of Europe to the United States for demonstration.
Of the two TriMedia 1100 processors inside the system, one is designed to handle asynchronous information, while the other handles isochronous data, according to Pine. The software platform used in the central gateway system is based on Digital Video Broadcast (DVB)'s Multimedia Home Platform engine.
The current prototype system also uses an Intel processor, Pine said, but only as a placeholder to pre-process Bluetooth protocols.
Philips has recently moved the company's headquarters for set-top box activities to Sunnyvale, Calif. The group is now called Home Access Solutions. Of the 3,000 people working within the group worldwide, 800 of them will be based in Silicon Valley. Philips currently holds the No. 2 position in the worldwide set-top market.
