Presentation by Ben Pronk held during Qt Developer Days 2009. http://qt.nokia.com/developer/learning/elearning

1. Qt experiences on NXP's connected TV‐platform
Ben Pronk, NXP semiconductors

2. Agenda
• Who are we, introducing NXP
• Digital television products, general overview
• Major market trends, the connectivity challenge
• The TV550, a digital television SOC
• Digital television widget implementation
• A first implementation without Qt
• Qt, deployment experiences
1

3. Introducing NXP Semiconductors
• Headquarters: Eindhoven, The
Netherlands
• Net sales: $5.4 billion in 2008
• Established in 2006 (formerly a
division of Philips)
• Businesses:
– Automotive
– Home
– Identification
– Multimarket Semiconductors

4. Introducing NXP Semiconductors
Leading in picture quality developments for
TV, Set-Top Box (STB) and PC TV, with:
Motion Accurate Picture Processing: first to
remove all artifacts from HDTV motion
pictures
Best digital natural motion
Integrate MPEG4 decoding in TV IC
Introduced the industry's first digital TV
processor manufactured in 45nm
technology
1 out of 2 TVs worldwide contains NXP chip
3

5. Digital Television Products
• An integrated digital television for 2010 is a complex product:
– Analogue TV reception and connectivity like Scart
– Digital TV reception and connectivity like HDMI
– Ever growing audio and video processing capabilities
– Advanced graphical user interfaces: 2D and 3D graphics capabilities
– TV-applications: Teletext, Electronic Program Guide, MHP, MHEG
– PC-monitor functionality: VGA, DVI, Display port
– PC-conectivity: Ethernet, Wifi, USB, PCI-e,
– In home networking: DLNA, uPnP
– Internet connectivity: YouTube, Catch-up Tv, Portals, VOD, Skype
– USB media devices: Flash devices, Camera’s, Camcorders
– Connectivity to portable media devices: Ipod, mobile phones
– Recording applications, PVR, Blue-Ray, transcoding
– Content protection and Digital Rights Management

6. Digital Television Products
KID’S MASTER
BEDROOM BEDROOM
camera
Internet radio
broadband
TV-to-TV link
INTERNET wireless
LAN
home theater audio
portable display
Media Server
RF remote control (DVD+RW/HDD
STUDY KITCHEN LIVING ROOM

7. The TV550, a Digital television SOC
Analogue Picture
Broadcast processing
Digital Sound
Broadcast processing
Analogue
digital I/O
Application
CPU, Graphics
generation
Connectivity

8. The TV550, a Digital television SOC
• Global single-chip LCD TV
platform
– Support for full HD 120Hz
panels and picture processing
– Conditional access and DRM
support MPEG4/H.264 decode
– Manufactured in leading edge
45nm process
– MIPS24kf CPU@550MHz

9. Major Market Trends
• Proliferating diversity and change
– Increasing amount of interconnects on a television
– With various protocols
– Exploding amount of potentially connected devices and
compatibility
– Exploding variety in to be supported media formats
– New formats and devices appearing every day
• Yet the basic TV quality of services needs to be
maintained
– Consumer products have a higher expected QOS than for a PC
– In a very competitive and price oriented market

10. Major Market Trends
• Shortened life cycle
– Consumer product release 6 months after
engineering samples
• Exponentially growing software content
– High diversity of interconnects, protocols and
standards
– Major convergence of “PC” type of functionality
– Software content in a television grows factor 2 every
1.5 year
– Modern televisions have already over 512 MByte of
memory

11. Major Market Trends
• Extensive use of 3d party software, COTS and
open source
– No silicon vendor can provide the requested
functionality “on its own”
– Economy reality and TTM forces the use of COTS
– Historically completely stable (over time) and closed
television applications are opened up.
– A television becomes more and more a small PC that
also has some basic TV capabilities

12. Digital television widget implementation
• In the television small useful applications on top
of the standard TV.
• Examples: Stock market, weather, latest news

13. Digital television widget implementation
• :Offers a “closed” widgets
service for TV and STB manufactures
consisting of selected widgets only
• :Offers a “open” widgets standard
including tooling. The widgets are mainly
developed by “The community”.

14. Digital television widget implementation
THE
Internet
Widget interpreter
Widget interpreter
Graphics,
Video, Audio
Window manager
Linux
services
Graphics rendering system
Control
IR Remote,
Keyboard,
mouse
TV5xx Hardware / SW platform

15. Digital television widget implementation
• The main challenges:
– Selecting a “bundle” of OPEN SOURCE SW modules
working well together OUT OF THE BOX
– Selecting a user friendly build environment
– Execution speed , television CPU’s are MIPS’s
running at 500MHz.
– Memory footprint (currently +/- 80 MB on libraries +
extra data cache) memory
– User interface, a television does not have a keyboard
– Integration with our TV platform software

16. Digital television widget implementation
Components for Webkit/Google-gadgets based on GTK
Google gadgets Web browser (For now Gtk‐launcher
test application)
Webkit
sqlite libxslt libxml2 curl libgtk2
GTK+ T1
glib libgif pixman cairo fontconfig atk
libpng Jpg-6b tiff freetype pango libxml
NXP DirectFb
DirectFb 1.3
Drivers
TV5xx hardware: Frame buffer Gfx Unit

17. Slide 16
T1 Add additional packages for GTK+
Home; 02.04.2009

18. Digital television widget implementation
• Experiences
– Configuration nightmare, just getting a complete build
with compatible libraries takes significant time.
– Problems are difficult to analyze, through the many
layers of software
– Execution speed is a major problem as many of the
modules are build with a PC in mind

19. Qt deployment experiences
• Selected Qt for a second implementation
– Making use of the Nokia open Source license
• Open Source yet:
– Complete and consistent package
– Building out of the box
– Easy configuration and integration

20. Qt deployment experiences
Software modules without Qt
Google gadgets Web browser (For now Gtk‐launcher
test application)
Webkit
sqlite libxslt libxml2 curl libgtk2
GTK+ T3
glib libgif pixman cairo fontconfig atk
libpng Jpg-6b tiff freetype pango libxml
NXP DirectFb
DirectFb 1.3
Drivers
TV5xx hardware: Frame buffer Gfx Unit

21. Slide 19
T3 Add additional packages for GTK+
Home; 02.04.2009

22. Qt deployment experiences
Software modules with Qt
Google gadgets Web browser Full functional browser
supplied as QT demo
QT4 (Nokia open source license) Webkit
libpng Jpg-6b libgif freetype
NXP DirectFb
DirectFb 1.xx
Drivers
TV5xx hardware: Frame buffer Gfx Unit

23. Qt deployment experiences
• Build system: Uses buildroot a specialized
toolbox in which (most) cross compile options are
already solved.
See : http://buildroot.uclibc.org
• Buildroot is a set of Makefiles and patches that
makes it easy to generate a cross-compilation
toolchain and root filesystem for your target Linux
system.

24. Qt deployment experiences

25. Qt deployment experiences
• Performance:
– Most open source applications are written to run on an
1.x GHz X86 with >512 MByte of RAM
– Qt appears to be a real “embedded” optimized library.
– Also incorporates a light window manager (QT).
• This set-up behaves reasonably even when
running on a Mips32 processor running at 350
MHz with only 130 MByte of memory.
• System stays responsive

26. Qt deployment experiences
• Further usage experiences
– Qt really builds out of the box
– Very limited effort (a few days) to integrate the
package with gadgets and other packages.
– Runs with very limited effort.
– Much more suitable for the embedded market than
“dumb” (and bulky) PC packages.
– Good documentation