Smart TV Chip Shows Great Development Potential

2012 was recognized as the “first year of smart TV”. During this year, China-based TCL, Skyworth and other brands; Sony, Sharp and other Japanese brands as well as Samsung and other South Korea-based manufacturers have launched smart TV. Different from the traditional TV only focusing on image processing performance, smart TV is more like a computer; in addition to high definition, 3D display, it is also equipped with operating system, enabling to manage TV through various programs, and to achieve video-on-demand, surf the Internet and other applications. Therefore, comparing with traditional TV chip, smart TV chip not only needs high-performance image processing IC, but also poses requirements for high-performance application processor to run a variety of complex procedures. In a sense, performance of processor will directly decide the market outlook of future smart TV. At present, there are increasingly more international processor giants entering smart TV chip market. High performance, multiple core become the development trend of smart TV chip.

Major application processor manufacturers march into smart TV.

Given the promising prospect, along with the growingly similar development trajectory of smart TV and mobile device chip, Intel, Qualcomm, Marvell have come in at this market.

As a new generation of smart TV will support higher-end operating system, showing naked eye 3D display, UHD (4K) display, multi-screen interaction, even somatosensory, voice, and other advanced features, which increases the requirement for processor performance, smart TV moves closer to mobile devices in chip development. To fully optimize smart TV functionality design, from 2012, Marvell, Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Apple, Samsung and other large processor manufacturers have entered the market.

Qualcomm has cooperated with Lenovo and developed develop the high-end smart TV K91 through the quad-core S4 chip; the first-generation chip of Google TV is supplied by Intel; the second-generation comes from Marvell who also support the smart TV S31 introduced by Lenovo. Mobile processor providers are rapidly rising in the TV market.