ARM Community: ARM enabling the connected consumer at CCBN 2010 - ARM Community

I recently attended CCBN, the premier Broadcast event in China. The event continues to grow, as Zhang Haitao, deputy director of the State Administration of Radio Film and Television, stated noting the increased scale of this exhibition and the new record level of exhibitors. That is impressive.

The China government re-stated their plans for Next Generation Broadband(NGB). There was a lot of excitement around triple play (which includes broadcast, voice telephony & broadband) and the NGB pilot demonstration, with many exhibitors and attendees working to understand how NGB affects their future plans.

Fujitsu Microelectronics Zi-Li Huang gave a talk about NGB’s interactive applications and the open source support.

He highlighted the importance of the CPU in an open system – with ARM coming from the mobile phone space as a key enabler in these next generation broadband networks – bringing out the importance of high performance with power efficiency complemented with Open Source support.


Energy efficiency
I was interested to see some companies focusing on energy efficiency. Haulu is one example of a Blu Ray player with a standby mode of less than 1W , the normal consumption is 3-4W. You may be wondering why people care about the watts since a Blu Ray player is plugged into a socket. In China, there is an increasing focus on energy efficiency and there are laws in place checking the total power consumption of consumer devices.


Connected Home
There were many examples of connected devices throughout the show including Huawei who are investigating the impact of triple play in the Connected Home. ARM also held a press round table with key partners Skyworth, ST, Trident & Wosu, answering many questions about connected home, triple player and ARM’s role to play in the trend of Open source and ecosystem support.



Big Screens
Screens seem to have reached an all time high in size – look at this screen with touch screen and internet enabled:

Digital Media Adapters (DMA)
Last year it was Internet access at SD resolutions – this year it is Internet access with 1080p. Great to see real products coming out supporting this.


It was not surprising to see lots of STB products, but interesting to see Conditional Access (CA)/security and 3D UI as well. Talking to key influencers in the market there is an increased focus on “service” as part of the new business model, Trustzone could be a key enabler for these new business models in the future.


It is always great to see ARM Partners at key industry events, such as AMLogic here in the home area. Recently they have been targeting, and have gained some progress in the China market, on STB showcasing their Cortex family and Mali-400 solution. The CTO and GM for TV/STB stated that the TV connected to internet is coming, and can foresee it pushing CPU bandwidth even higher with a limited power budget. ARM is well positioned for this and would be beneficial in this area from two angles: power consumption and fruitful ecosystem.

I look forward to attending CCBN next year and seeing the growth ARM and ARM Partners in these markets.

Tom Wang, Segment Marketing Manager, ARM, joined ARM in Oct 2004 and in his role he is responsible for ARM in the Taiwan market, technology & product marketing of strategic planning & development plans and to maintain relationships with existing partners. Tom in the industry accumulated more than 20 years of experience, place of work encompasses the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific region, product areas across the MFP, CD Player, multifunction printers, scanners, and mobile phones, product development, market development and marketing. Prior to joining ARM, Tom worked at Philips, Intel and other companies for a number of different businesses, toured the United States and Asian countries.

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