FOCUS ON CHINA Maxscend debuts IC for China’s Digital TV market      Eyeing the huge potential of China’s digital TV market, Maxscend Technologies, a leading digital TV IC fabless design house in China, has announced the MXD1320, a demodulator IC fully compliant with China’s digital terrestrial television standard.      Like many other countries around the world, China is in the process of switching from analog to digital TV broadcasting. The home-grown national standard, code-named GB20600-2006, became mandatory for Chinese broadcasters on August 1st, 2007. New TV sets with digital tuners need to conform to this standard, as of 2008. According to the current timetable, most regions in China will be covered by digital TV broadcasting before 2012, and analog TV broadcasting will be switched off in 2015.      Despite the huge potential, the actual deployment of digital TV has been slow and hampered by the complexity of the standard. The GB20600-2006 standard is a fusion of a multi-carrier version developed by Tsinghua University in Beijing and a single-carrier version developed by Jiaotong University in Shanghai.      The dual mode support is favored by service providers because it offers the freedom to achieve the best frequency utilization and coverage. However, it also presents a considerable challenge to receiver design. Before the MXD1320, two separate circuitries in a chip or even two separate chips would have to be deployed to provide the dual-mode support. Such a solution significantly increases total system cost and design complexity.      The MXD1320 becomes the first device to truly support both the modes defined in the national standard, at low cost. Rather than sticking two demodulators on one chip, the MXD1320 achieves maximum resource sharing with innovative algorithms and architecture, thus incurring only minimum additional cost, compared to a single mode demodulator design. Designed with advanced low power design techniques, the MXD1320 also has a low power consumption of 170mW.      Based on MXD1320 engineering samples, six major TV and set-top box manufacturers have demonstrated their receiver products. A dozen other design-in projects are on-going. MXD1320 production chips will be shipped to customers in mid-March.      There are currently around 470 million TV sets in China, with annual TV sales of over 40 million units. Even though cable and satellite subscriptions have grown rapidly in recent years, 65% of Chinese households, mainly in rural areas, still rely on free-to-air broadcasts.      According to an estimate from the China Digital TV Industry Association, there will be 230 million digital TV users in China, five years from now, with an annual increase of 70%. Lenovo, Avaya offer VoIP solution for “Think” PCs      Avaya Inc. and Lenovo have announced the availability of the Avaya Mobility Edition for Lenovo ThinkPad notebooks and ThinkCentre desktops, a solution targeted for business users that embeds the Avaya Internet protocol (IP) Softphone application into Lenovo PCs. The unified solution enables complete enterprise communications from any location, with optimum security, usability and quality of service.      With an Avaya IP Softphone, a Lenovo PC becomes the office phone by integrating with an existing office extension number and linking it with multiple office, home and mobile numbers that can ring simultaneously or in a sequence at the user’s choice. Location becomes irrelevant. Callers can reach employees quickly through a single number; employees have full access to Avaya Communication Manager features, voicemail and directories on their Lenovo PCs. In addition, users can make calls using a simple, click-to-dial feature from corporate directories, call logs, Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes contact lists or any open desktop application.      “The Avaya Mobility Edition for our Lenovo ThinkPad notebooks provides unified communications that facilitate business communications among our staff internally and with our customers externally,” said Jerry Perkins, executive vice president, Emerging Technologies and Corporate Strategy for Cross Telecom. “This secure, cost-effective solution has generated significant interest from our customers, both in fixed and mobile locations, due to its ease of use.”      The solution includes support for biometric log-in using fingerprint readers on Lenovo ThinkPad notebooks and optional Lenovo external keyboards, as well as a new voicemail notification function that uses Lenovo’s ThinkLight feature. Lenovo’s integrated fingerprint reader provides easy access to business communications with the swipe of a finger, while protecting contact lists and call histories from unauthorized access. In addition, Lenovo’s ThinkLight, located on the top of the ThinkPad notebooks’ screen bezel, alerts users to incoming voicemail.      “By using the Avaya Mobility Edition on Lenovo ThinkPad notebooks and ThinkCentre desktops, users can streamline communications by taking their office phone with them on their PC, whether they are working in the office, from home or on the road,” said Bob Galush, vice president, Software and Peripherals Marketing, Lenovo. “This combined solution integrates the latest Voice over Internet Protocol solution with Lenovo’s proven PC technologies, resulting in a secure, easy-to-use computing and telephony experience.” For more information visit the Avaya Website at www.avaya.com, and the Lenovo website at www.lenovo.com. China’s MCU market reached US$2.5 billion in 2007      CCID Consulting, a leading research, consulting and IT outsourcing service provider in China, has released an article on China’s microcontroller (MCU) market, which is expected to reach US$2.5 billion in 2007.      In 2007, there was rapid growth in the manufacturing of electronic products in China. Qualitatively, structural upgrading also followed. This drove up market demand for microcontrollor units (MCUs), and China’s MCU market grew by almost 20% year-on-year, reaching US$2.5 billion. The market is expected to maintain fast growth over the next few years.      Regarding product segments, the markets for 16- and 32-bit products grew fast, while the 8-bit product market leveled off. Revenues from 4-bit product sales grew slowly. This trend is expected to become more apparent over the next few years.      Prices continued to polarize. Products aimed at particular applications will continue to see high prices, while the prices of mature and general-purpose products will continue to drop.      The process of product integration and substitution accelerated. In 2007, and the boundary between MCUs with different bit numbers was increasingly blurred. There was improved compatibility between products with different bit numbers. The continuous integration of MCUs with other products, such as DSPs, continued to expand the scope of application for systems on chip (SoC). This was particularly apparent in the field of portable digital consumer products.      New applications became the hot spot pursued by leading MCU enterprises. In 2007, these new applications included the fields of variable frequency air conditioning, automotive electronics, motor control, family security control, financial tokens and portable medical electronics. Over the next few years, these fields are expected to become an important source of performance growth for MCU enterprises.      On the whole, electronic product manufacturing in China will maintain fairly good growth momentum over the next few years. The rapid upgrading of product manufacturing and consumer demand will continue to drive fast growth in China’s MCU market.      CCID Consulting Co., Ltd. is the first Chinese consulting firm to be listed in the Growth Enterprise Market (GEM) of the Hong Kong stock exchange and is directly affiliated to the China Center for Information Industry Development (the CCID Group).      Headquartered in Beijing, CCID Consulting has set up branch offices in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Harbin, with over 300 professional consultants and industry experts. The company’s business now covers over 200 large and medium-size cities in China. SGI Altix HPC system ensures launch of FENGYUN-3      To ensure the successful launch of China’s new polar-orbiting meteorological satellite, FENGYUN-3, the China National Satellite Meteorological Center (NSMC) turned to high-performance computing (HPC) and storage solutions from SGI.      NSMC recently deployed China’s largest shared-memory computer ---- and the fourth most powerful computer in the country ---- to support the launch program for the satellite. The SGI Altix system is powered by 1,280 Intel Itanium 2 processor cores and 4TB of shared memory. NSMC integrated the supercomputer with a 26TB SGI InfiniteStorage solution and the SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem, CXFS.      The FENGYUN-3 is China’s second-generation polar-orbiting meteorological satellite and is scheduled for a 2008 launch. The scientists and engineers at NSMC are fine-tuning the software they developed to effectively ingest, process and distribute data sent by the new satellite.      Listed at the No. 4 spot on the latest Top 100 list of HPC systems in China, the SGI Altix 4700 system is now ready to handle the NSMC’s remote sensing data preprocessing, replay data processing, simulation tests, Archival and Retrieval Service System (ARSS) database, and new application development requirements.      The SGI NUMAlink interconnect enables the NSMC’s six SGI Altix 4700 nodes to deliver fast memory access, which is critical to achieving balanced, sustained performance on technical workloads. Data crosses over an SGI NUMAlink switch, round-trip, in as little as 50 nanoseconds ---- less time than it takes a beam of light to travel 50 feet - compared to 10,000 nanoseconds or more with many commodity clustering interconnects. And by deploying the CXFS file system, NSMC scientists can share data instantly, without having to move massive files across the network.      “The reason we selected the SGI HPC solution for this mission critical application is because we will rely on the SGI interconnect, an extremely fast and low-latency fabric, to ensure optimum performance,” said Jun Yang, director, National Satellite Meteorological Center.      Jin Ming Shi, director of the FENGYUN satellite ground application network system department and chief architect, added, “The installation of the new Altix system went smoothly and was on schedule. The SGI service team was a great asset in deploying such a large system.”      The National Satellite Meteorological Center (NSMC) is an affiliate of the China Meteorological Administration. NSMC is responsible for ingesting and processing the data of Chinese and foreign meteorological satellites.