STMicroelectronics, a global leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications and a world leader in ICs for digital TVs and set-top boxes, announced details of the first member of the Newman family of TV SoCs, part of ST’s industry-leading broadcast plus connected-services platforms. The FLI7680, codenamed Newman Ultra, delivers unrivalled performance and represents a giant leap forward in the state-of-the-art in SoCs for Smart TVs.

As premium-content choices evolve, TVs need to support a new era of value-added services and ecosystems, such as Google TV™, well beyond the first generation of broadcast and broadband based services. The Newman Ultra architecture provides industry-leading performance, which can power amazingly responsive TV applications, along with unmatched video-decoding capability; with it, Smart TVs can now smoothly combine multiple video sources and applications in the same screen view.

“The concept of the Smart TV is rapidly evolving, demanding an ever-increasing level of chip performance, integration, flexibility, and security provisioning,” commented Luigi Mantellassi, General Manager, WAVE Division. “Leveraging our leading world-wide position and software developers’ reach in the set-top box market, the Newman Ultra SoC allows our customers to expand their brand value and create the ultimate entertainment platform, where traditional broadcast, video on demand, games, and social networks can coexist, powered by an intuitive user interface.”

In tandem with evolving panel technologies, Newman Ultra continues to innovate audio/video processing under the Faroudja™ brand to deliver an unmatched front-of-screen experience. From large-screen projection theaters to 4Kx2K 3D displays, Faroudja technology continues to be a recognized mark of quality.

Newman Ultra also integrates a new dedicated security processor capable of supporting the world’s expanding range of security providers’ schemes to ensure the ultimate protection for premium content and personal data.

At the heart of this new device, the combination of the advanced ARM® Dual-Cortex™-A9 SMP application processors and ARM® Mali™ graphics processor, as well as dedicated audio and video decoders, crypto processor and flexible composition engine, deliver uncompromising system performance. A software developer kit (SDK) will provide support for open-source Application Program Interfaces (APIs) such as Linux TV, improving time-to-market, porting cost and creativity

Newman Ultra (FLI7680) is sampling in Q1 2012 to early-access customers, and is scheduled to enter volume production in Q4 2012.