Tech News - Philips and Samsung Agree on Chip Software for TV's

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Philips and Samsung Agree on Chip Software for TV's

01/06/2004

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Dutch Philips Electronics and South Korea Samsung Electronics said on Tuesday they had agreed on a single software standard for chips used in devices like digital televisions.

The two top-five consumer electronics makers hope that their Universal Home Application Programing Interface (UH-API) will convince software makers, system integrators and device vendors to write applications for their products.

Such applications for TVs, home servers and DVD and hard disk recorders could include electronic programing guides, shopping applications, and music and video stores.

Philips and Samsung, which are also among the world's biggest suppliers of chips to consumer electronics makers such as Sony Corp., Matsushita, LG Electronics would like other semiconductor makers to use the new standard, so it will be available in "every new product that comes to market."

"This is another example of how the industry is driving toward open, interoperable standards," a Philips spokesman said.

With the advent of digital technology and the Internet, the consumer electronics industry is increasingly developing products that need to run versatile software to run advanced services. This requires new interoperability standards between products from different brands, on top of current, more simple ones that allow any VCR or DVD player to hook up to a TV.

"The fact that Philips is partnering with one its major competitors in the consumer electronics field...shows the urgent customer need for standards' harmonization allowing more compatibility among vendors," said analyst Gaetan van der Bruggen at broker Petercam. Samsung and Philips are already part of the Digital Home Working Group of seventeen of the world's largest electronics makers that have agreed on common standards to make it easier for consumers to swap songs and pictures at home.

The current initiative is of a different, more basic level, in that both companies want to make sure that the same software application will run on chips from either company.

Philips said the standard will also be complementary with the leading operating systems across the industry. This means that software like Microsoft's Windows, Linux and other proprietary programs that are currently popular in the consumer electronics industry will run on the chips.

Philips' Nexperia set of chips, for home electronics and handsets, will be UH-API compliant. It and Samsung will initially introduce the new standard to its high definition TV chips and expand to other applications, beginning in 2004.

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