controller and a full suite of set-top box/iDTV interfaces together with a high performance CPU into a single System-on-a-Chip (SoC) solution.

The ZL10320's PVR Controller can sustain the simultaneous transfer of three MPEG-2 Transport Streams with a hard disk drive, permitting, for

example, simultaneous recording of two TV Channels and playing-back a third; essentially three VCRs in a box. The key capability of PVR technology is

the ability to live-pause and time-shift live broadcast television, where a recorded stream can be played back before its recording has completed. The

ZL10320 supports this function, and in addition allows the simultaneous recording of a second digital channel. This is made possible by high-

performance on-chip DMA controllers, which transfer bitstreams between the PVR Controller, SDRAM and IDE Hard Disk(s) efficiently, with minimum

CPU overhead.

PVR functionality places considerable demand on the software environment, which necessitates that such systems are based on robust multitasking

operating systems, supporting virtual memory and memory management. Linux, with its wide range of capabilities is ideally suited for such applications.

Consequently the ZL10320 uses the high-performance PowerPC 405 RISC processor, which fully supports the requirements of the Linux Operating