company A company formed in August 1994 by
Acorn Computer Group plc to exploit the
ARM RISC in television
set-top box decoders. They planned to woo British Telecommunications plc to use the box in some of its
video on demand trials.
The "STB1" box was based on an
ARM8 core with additional circuits to enable
MPEG to be decoded in software - possibly dedicated instructions for interpolation, inverse
DCT or
Huffman table extraction. A prototype featured audio
MPEG chips, Acorn's
RISC OS operating system and supported Oracle Media Objects and Microword. Online planned to reduce component count by transferring functions from boards into the single RISC chip.
The company was origianlly wholly owned by Acorn but was expected to bring in external investment.
[Article by nobody@tandem.com cross-posted from tandem.news.computergram, 1994-07-07].
In 1996 they releasd the imaginatively titled "Set Top Box 2" (STB20M) with a 32 MHz ARM 7500 and 2 to 32 MB
RAM. There was also a "Set Top Box 22".
(https://www.khantazi.org/Archives/MachineLst.html#STB1). (https://www.mcmordie.co.uk/acornhistory/riscpc700.shtml). (https://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/NC.html).
(2007-11-12)