With the fast development and maturity of 5G, big data and AI technologies, the concepts such as smart home and AIoT are becoming a reality.

Leading smartphone brands adopted AIoT business models years ago by putting smartphones at the centre of people's lives. Inside the home, one of the most popular AIoT devices is the smart TV. Sitting in the centre of smart homes, smart TVs are becoming larger and smarter, and new software apps are being released that can be accessed via a smart TV to enrich our home entertainment. To make these interfaces easier to use there is a need for smart TVs to offer higher resolution, higher frame rate and low latency. Essentially the graphics user interface (GUI) needs to be as good as it can be.

Realtek is one of the world’s leading fabless IC providers and has been working closely with Imagination for more than 12 years to create industry-leading SoCs for smart TVs, DTVs, and high-end OTT boxes.

One of the latest Realtek DTV SoCs is the RTD2885N, which integrates our IMG B-Series BXE-4-32 GPU, which has been designed to address the needs of smart TV, DTV and OTT use cases. BXE is a highly area-optimised design that perfectly balances efficiency and high performance.

With support for the latest in-demand features, such as up to 8K resolution and 4K resolution with HDR, it is the ideal solution for smart TVs and is key in enabling the delivery of innovative GUI solutions to TV brands, thus enhancing the experience for the end customer.

One of the reasons we are excited to see the RTD2885N in silicon is that it’s the first DTV SoC to integrate Imagination’s IMGIC image compression technology. IMGIC is the latest version of our frame buffer compression technology. Frame buffer compression aims to reduce the bandwidth and power consumption generated by reading and writing render targets to and from system memory. IMGIC includes a lossless compression mode and a variable compression rate mode where quality remains perfect, but the compression achieved depends on the contents of the render target.

Typically, a reduction of 50% is obtained across a wide range of reference test images: you can learn more about IMGIC in our downloadable white paper, but IMGIC can provide up to 75% image compression level while yielding virtually lossless images.

Thanks to this unique, industry-leading, real-time image compression, the Realtek RTD2885N operates with greatly reduced memory bandwidth, without impacting image quality, enabling smart TV manufacturers to offer a high-quality, fast, and fluid GUI that’s a pleasure to use.

It’s no surprise then that it is currently shipping into DTVs worldwide from significant brands. The Realtek RTD2885N is a leading SoC that is bringing new cutting-edge graphical user interface experiences to smart TVs around the world and Imagination is excited to join Realtek on this journey.