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Toshiba Corporation - Cell Regza

Toshiba's Regza Cell processor may be a harbinger of even more sophisticated chips that are increasingly finding their way into TVs. That's a major reason we chose the Cell processor for a CEATEC Innovation Award in the home entertainment category.

In addition to handling the typical video processing duties for a 55-inch LCD TV, the Cell processor demonstrated the ability to handle 3-D content while upconverting 1080p to 4,000x2,000 resolution. Currently housed in a separate set-top box, the Cell processor showed that it also could be the heart of a hard drive-based time-shift machine that allows for up to 26 hours of recording from up to 8 channels of digital terrestrial broadcasts, the company said. The time-shift feature enables simultaneous viewing and recording of programs and access to broadband content.

The Cell also showed a remarkable ability to overcome the shortcomings of standard video processors. While conventional processors can’t keep pace with the rate at which data is delivered from the receiver, resulting in transfers that are made with color information that’s compressed to 25 percent of brightness, the Cell processor uses an algorithm to increase reproduction of color data to half the level of brightness. In doing so, the Cell processor creates a sharper picture by reducing blurring at an image’s edge. It also can detect the noise compression of low-resolution Internet content, separating and correcting the image to make it more suitable for lager screen TVs. It also allows for automatic fine-tuning of multiple control settings including 1,024 steps in color temperature, a 128-scale dynamic gamma range and 100 brightness settings, including 32 each for color saturation.

The 3.2-GHz processor will likely serve as the hub of home entertainment systems in the future as it moves toward being fully integrated with a TV. While initially the Cell processor will find a home in high-end products, it's expected to eventually reach a mainstream audience in helping deliver high-quality video. It's that combination of sophisticated technology paired with an ability to be used in a wide array of products that makes the Cell processor the winner of the CEATEC Innovations Award for home entertainment.

Mark Seavy