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PowerNucleusZodiac’s acclaimed embedded software stack dramatically improves the performance of applications on the set-top box. For instance, the PowerNucleus solution improves the performance of many OCAP or “OnRamp to OCAP” applications by an order of magnitude. Zodiac’s PowerNucleus solution is a set of software libraries that are integrated into the operating system’s support for application development . In effect, many API calls will be redirected to PowerNucleus. PowerNucleus’ Core module acts a traffic agent, intelligently managing memory and directing requests to the appropriate system resources. PowerNucleus’ Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) modules are used in lieu of the system’s native support for functions relating to graphics, sound, memory management, or file management.
Patching and general maintenance. The Core layer of PowerNucleus is a dynamic, multi-instance library that allows applications to automatically obtain benefits of optimized algorithms as newer versions of the library are deployed Catering to hardware constraints. Different branches of the code for different STB models exist in source code only format. However, only the required features of the STB model are included in the compilation of the library as the compilation is managed through conditional compilation directives. Applications simply use unified API calls on all set top boxes. Unified data access API. Allow application data to be retrieved from BFS, ADS or other data source through the same API Memory management. PowerNucleus memory manager provides optimized memory pooling and controls potential memory leaks Drawing engine. Application can freely switch video modes at runtime Double buffering technology is supported automatically by application request PowerNucleus automatically unpacks images when they are required for drawing so applications can store this data in packed form until it is required for use (this approach usually reduced memory requirement by half). Furthermore, each application can export its own unpack algorithms to optimize performance and reduce memory usage. PowerNucleus automatically supports image caching but it can be programmatically switched off for some dynamic surfaces. Depending on the video mode used or on the resource usage policy (system service or client application) PowerNucleus can allocate available video memory and, if required, some system memory for the cache process. A complete font subsystem is implemented; any image font or BFT font or ordinary TrueType font can be used by a designer and will then be converted into an internal PowerNucleus font resource upon compilation; applications are also free to register their own font formats.
Sound system. 32 sound channels and 32-bit mixer with re-sampling (interpolation) support; special sound priority control takes place to achieve most desirable results. A complete sound subsystem is implemented, e.g. GSM decoder for voice recordings is embedded into the library; applications are free to register additional sound formats.
General
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