Leading supplier of consumer electronics
EPG (Electronic Program Guide) software for Integrated Digital TV products. Our customer's graphics department had a very clear idea about how the user interface should *look*, but little design work had gone into how it should "work" - i.e. the precise interactions between the various screens. MPC Data produced a prototype EPG (in Borland Delphi) as a basis for discussion. The PC-based prototype allowed our engineers to communicate effectively with the customer's graphic and user interface designers and led to a specification for a usable EPG on the target devices that MPC Data subsequently implemented.

Operating System: pSOS Nucleus+
Development Skill: Embedded Comms protocols Porting

Leading supplier of consumer electronics
Image Decompression: MPC Data took over support for an image decompression library. The library supported PNG, JPG and GIF image formats and was modified to work in a multi-tasking environment and to co-operatively 'block' during any stage in the decode process if data was unavailable.

Operating System: pSOS
Development Skill: Embedded device drivers (Porting time critical)

Leading supplier of consumer electronics
Graphics Libraries: Numerous developments in the area of Digital TV On-Screen Display (OSD) graphics. MPC Data have developed many discrete graphics libraries covering the following areas: • Several generations of graphics hardware devices from Philips, CCube and NEC; • Assembler optimisation and portable low-level C for Motorola 68000, Coldfire and NEC processors; • Low-level hardware acceleration using hardware 'blit'-ing and DMA; • Developing standards-compliant interfaces for Mediahighway and DVB subtitling; • Stringent performance optimisations to pass external test suites; • Developing sophisticated tricks and techniques, often in close collaboration with hardware chip manufacturers, to extend the capabilities of the hardware to satisfy the end-customer's requirements; • Developing time- and memory-efficient algorithms to handle clipping (rectangular and non-rectangular), masking, dashed-line drawing, multiple colour-depths, writing modes (replace, XOR, etc), transparency, etc; • Font rendering; • Bitmap conversion;

Operating System: pSOS Nucleus+
Development Skill: Embedded device drivers (Porting time critical)

Pace
Design and implementation of API test software for PowerTV platform port. To minimise the risk of problems during system integration, MPC Data were contracted to write a driver API test suite. Since the test suite encapsulated our independent interpretation of the PowerTV API specification, it revealed a number of potential misunderstandings, which were detected and corrected at an early stage in the project.

Operating System: Proprietary
Development Skill: Embedded

NTL
Development of a high level STB control application called the resident application. The application ran on top of a proprietary OS and controlled the selection of channels to view, the display of screen assets and the launching of other applications

Operating System: Proprietary
Development Skill: Application