Apparatus and related method for sharing address and data pins of a cryptocard module and external memory

Abstract

An information receiver, a digital television system and a method for sharing the data pins. The digital television (DTV) system has a front-end circuit comprising a DTV demodulator and a back-end circuit. The back-end circuit includes a DTV demultiplexer, a cryptocard module controller, and an external memory controller. The DTV system also includes an external memory coupled to the back-end circuit, an address bus and a data bus to which the external memory is coupled through a plurality of address and data pins, and a cryptocard module coupled to the front-end circuit and the back-end circuit for performing conditional access and security functions, the cryptocard module having address and data pins coupled to address and data pins of the external memory. The invention reduces the pins and reduces the circuit size of the back end circuit and the producing cost of the DTV.

Description

technical field [0001] The present invention provides an information receiver, especially a digital television system including an authentication card module and an external memory, wherein the address and data pins of the authentication card module are coupled to the address and data ports of the external memory pins to reduce the number of pins used. Background technique [0002] In the digital cable TV system, video / audio content is protected by a conditional access scrambling system. Authentication card module (cryptocard module), such as the deployment point (Point of Deployment, POD) security module (now called cable card, also known as CableCARD) formulated by the American Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), or digital TV Broadcast common interface (Digital VideoBroadcasting Common Interface, DVB-CI) module, which can transmit TV content to consumer's receiver and machine terminal (i.e. host device), remove or re-scramble the TV content. The authenticatio...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

In addition, the demultiplexer 32 uses at least two transport stream ports TS1, TS2 to receive transport stream data, and the transport stream ports TS1, TS2 each use multiple pins, which also increases the number of pins used by the host backend integrated circuit 30. The total number of pins, and the use of a large number of pins will increase the manufacturing cost of the host back-end integrated circuit 30, increase the coverage of the host back-end integrated circuit 30, and make the design of the host back-end integrated circuit 30 more difficult

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