Satnews Daily
September 7th, 2012

Entropic... SoC'ing It To EchoStar (SatBroadcasting™—Tech)


[SatNews] Entropic Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq:ENTR) has deployed its STB system-on-a-chip (SoC) and...

...demodulator technology in three EchoStar models, which are currently being deployed at Bell Canada, Dish Mexico and Telus. With the use of Entropic's STB SoC and demodulator technology, EchoStar offers fully-functional HD satellite STBs, which are personal video recorder (PVR)-ready via external hard drives. The devices also support over-the-top (OTT) and interactive applications via an Internet connection.

Entropic's SoC uses an integrated ARM® application CPU to power advanced application processing, with a multi-stream transport processor to support PVR functionality. It also leverages flexible, multi-format video and audio decoders and a memory controller to provide ample memory capacity for HD picture decoding and advanced system performance. The EchoStar STBs also use Entropic's advanced, low-power turbo-coding demodulator, which provides increased satellite system throughput by up to 35 percent utilizing existing bandwidth. When Entropic's STB SoC is coupled with its demodulator technology, it provides the core components for EchoStar's HD-PVR STB application. The very high level of integration enables a low system bill of materials (BoM) to support a variety of applications. Further, Entropic's demodulator has been designed to support EchoStar's proprietary turbo-coding demodulation standard.