Building Cost Effective and Robust SoC-based Network Appliances

By Krishnan Venkataraman, VP of Engineering, MosChip Semiconductor Technology Ltd.
Embedded.com (05/17/10, 08:02:00 PM EDT)

Today, consumers and businesses expect secured access to their information or content on demand anywhere at any time. As digital media is now a standard for audio/video (AV) content, its access and delivery has become very complex, particularly for video applications.

This is primarily due to a high network bandwidth requirement for high definition (HD) resolutions and processing bandwidth requirements for video decoding, such as MPEG4/H.264. In addition, the Internet has become a way of life in many aspects and as a result user authentication and transaction authorization is becoming more significant for service providers.

System-on-a-Chip (SoC) solutions have been called upon to simplify many of these complexities within various demanding applications across many digital consumer products.

In fact, SoCs are providing improved product solutions in almost all areas, such as enterprise, retail, financial, healthcare, automotive, process control and more. Well optimized SoCs integrated with the most commonly needed functions and peripherals, yet generic to address different application verticals, can offer comprehensive embedded system solutions.

For example, with a base SoC as the foundation, a completed embedded system solution can be made to offer connectivity, content storage, content delivery, security and content presentation.

Tuned as a Network Appliance Processor (NAP) a SoC-based system has proven well capable and cost-effective with applications such as a USB Server, network attached storage (NAS), Point-of-Sale (PoS) terminals, Digital Signage and Smart Card Terminal applications.

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