Product guide
18
HD PVR with W5300
H
DT (Hyundai Digital Technology) is a Korean
STB company who mainly develops and
produces digital satellite, digital cable, PVR,
IPTV and etc.
I
n January of 2009, HDT started their HD PVR
hardware design. In their new design, they
have used STi7101 by STMicronics as their
main processor. The Ethernet controller of this
new product is used to communicate with a
middleware and add some Internet services.
WIZnet’s W5300 was adopted for the Ethernet
functions.
S
Ti7101 already includes the integrated
MAC and MII/RMII interface. Therefore, the
network can be implemented just by adding
an external PHY chip. In HDT’s point of view,
the W5300’s additional MAC overlaps the
onboard MAC in STi7101. However, the main
reason why HDT chose WIZnet’s solution is the
network performance. With the software TCP/
IP stack, resource is shared between the CPU
and networking. When there is a large amount
of data to be processed by the network, the
CPU overhead is increased, and it degrades the
overall system stability.
T
he Hybrid architecture of W5300 was used
to connect to the middleware which is
operated in the upper layer of WIZnet. Basically,
W5300 provides 8 sockets to process Ethernet
data through TCP/IP hardwired core. However,
if we congure the rst channel (socket #0) as
Mac-Raw mode, the socket #0 operates as like
MAC/PHY chips. With this architecture, the STB
can utilize the hardware stack for application
use while leaving the software stack for
middleware use.
W5300
Application Note