Case Studies by Markets

Sysmedia
Various components for a Teletext authoring application, including COM components for spell checking, text drawing etc., and an XML input service for the News database.

Operating System: Windows®95/98 Windows®2000
Development Skill: Application

Sysmedia
Design and development of an application for searching through Teletext archives based on a variety of flexible search criteria.

Operating System: Windows®95/98 Windows®2000
Development Skill: Application

Leading supplier of consumer electronics
Soft Modem, implemented by porting code from a stand-alone external modem to a set-top box environment. The Z80 8-bit single-tasking dedicated code that managed a modem data pump required extensive re-working to the co-operative multi-tasking 32-bit environment. The code was enhanced for bi-directional V.23 operation in addition to V.22 and V.22bis. Performance of the software was critical to this development to ensure the modem operation did not occupy more than the minimum CPU bandwidth and ensure that interrupt latencies were not too onerous on the rest of the system.

Operating System: pSOS
Development Skill: Embedded Device Drivers Comms Protocols (Porting time critical)

Leading supplier of consumer electronics
Design and implemenation of many low-level drivers to abstract complex hardware in various set-top box environments. This required a familiarity with the hardware, interfacing with suppliers' technical representatives, experimentation and development of suitable control algorithms. Amongst the areas covered were: • Sound Samples - managing the hardware that can replay sound samples in mpeg and PCM formats; • Video and still picture scaling & positioning; • A manager for the various video 'layers' supported by current set-top box hardware (e.g. background, still picture, video, graphics, cursor layers); • Real-Time Clock; • Wireless Keyboard; • Audio/video switching matrix to control routing through the various SCART and other accessory rear-panel interfaces; • Smartcard interface: a very low-level driver (synchronous serial port and protocol) to communicate with the "smart card" that controls access rights and provides decryption keys to the set-top-box.;

Operating System: pSOS Nucleus+
Development Skill: Embedded Device Drivers Comms Protocols (Porting time critical)

Leading supplier of consumer electronics
Filesystems and device drivers to enable video data to be stored onto and streamed from a variety of bulk storage devices. We have worked with hard disk and solid-state interfaces, implementing standard filesystem structures to allow exchangeable devices to be read/written both in set-top box and standard PC environments, and implementing wear-levelling strategies for flash programmable devices.

Operating System: pSOS
Development Skill: Embedded Device Drivers (Porting time critical)

Leading supplier of consumer electronics
Maintenance and Support: with many tens of thousands of our customers' Integrated Digital TVs (IDTV) now in people's homes, ongoing work is needed to investigate and correct problems identified when broadcasters introduce new interactive applications or conditional access mechanisms. MPC Data liaise with broadcasters and our customers to develop work-arounds or upgrades. MPC Data implemented the necessary software for an IDTV to replace its operating firmware from broadcast data in an 'off-air' upgrade. This critical software required careful peer-review and thorough testing before being deployed.

Operating System: pSOS
Development Skill: Embedded Device Drivers Comms Protocols

Leading supplier of consumer electronics
Diagnostics and Testing software: our broad range of experience in all areas of digital TV set-top box development means that we are ideally placed to develop diagnostic and test software. In addition to ad hoc test drivers for development use we have specified and implemented: • Test suites for low-level basic functionality of set-top boxes and IDTVs; • Production test and configuration software used both to initialise set-top boxes at the end of the production line and in service centres to diagnose faults; • Automated test suites to provide regression testing, parameter range testing, performance and soak testing of driver and other interfaces;

Operating System: pSOS Nucleus+ MSDOS Windows
Development Skill: Embedded

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)

Sony Broadcast and Professional Europe
Functional design, software design and implementation of video editing software for reporters "in the field" to prepare video inserts on a portable editing console. The equipment is based on a standard notebook PC and custom docking station with video stored digitally on magneto-optical media. MPC Data developed the PC software and the docking station firmware which performed real-time MPEG video encode/decode.

Operating System: Windows®95/98
Development Skill: Windows application Embedded Device drivers

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