The hardware platform Lacking datasheets or a service manual most of this is guesswork based on an examination of the software and hints from the net. I have not actually disected my set. The easy way to divide the hardware is by the circuit boards. In the LCD sets it looks like this: 1. Power supply Makes a low voltage logic supply and several higher voltage/current supplies on command from the main board. 2. High voltage inverter for the LCD panel Power goes in along with an enable and a PWM signal from the CPU. High voltage goes to the backlights. Some sets use traditional CCFL lamps while some use a newer EEFL (External Electrode Fluorescent Lamp) tech. Some sets can control the backlighting by section of the screen but I have no details. At any rate, this level of the hardware probably isn't useful to know much about unless you are trying to repair a set. 3. LCD driver This board takes in the LVDS datastream from the CPU and actually produces the waveforms to drive the panel. Unless it malfunctions it probably isn't very interesting. 4. Power button and LEDs This board has the IR sensor, power button and the indicator LEDs. On my set that is a red and blue LED, on others it is a more complex set of LEDs connected to a small controller chip with an I2C bus connecting going to the MICOM section of the SoC on the motherboard. 5. Keyboard The keys are encoded as a pair of analog voltages. This board connects to #4 but appears to simply pass through back to a pair of pins on the main SOC which have an ADC function. 6. Main Board with the SOC, input jacks, etc. Almost all of the functionality of the set comes from a single SoC (System on Chip) made by MStar. Most of this site is dedicated to the hardware embedded in that chip and the software running on it's CPU, associated DSP functions and a seperate low power 8051 based microcontroller. The Saturn5 and Saturn6 seem to dominate the sets similar to mine. The new 2010 models may be using a new Saturn7 main processor. However there are a few more components on the main board. There are several small serial eeproms for the EDID information for the HDMI and RGB/VGA ports. These are write protected during normal operation but the main CPU can enable writing by either the CPU itself or by the devices connected to the video ports, such as a PC. Another serial eeprom is connected to HDCP, probably loaded with the crypto keys. The CPU apparently has external RAM and ROM/Flash. The exact amount could vary but my set has 64MB of each and apparently that is fairly uniform across the models related to mine. Unlike many embedded products the NAND Flash is directly mapped into memory and code can be directly executed from it instead of just used as a block device. There is a small SPI flash chip involved in the first stage bootloader that gets U-Boot loaded and running. Configuration information is kept in another serial eeprom on the i2c bus. Mine is 64KB but 128KB parts are reported. The R/F section is in a self contained tuner module. The antenna/cable signal goes in. The CPU communicates with it over an i2c bus to tune it and probably get signal quality info back. Coming out are a DIF+ and DIF- which are a differential signal with the digital information. Then there is a VIDEO_OUT with composite video and a SIF pin which looks like Sound IF in that it is the raw audio carrier carrying the original mono FM audio and the MTS and SAP information. Probably also works with some of the international formats as well, although maybe not the AM sound used in some places. Some tuners have an AUDIO_OUT pin carrying a fully demodulated copy fo the mono FM sound but it isn't used in these digital sets. The exact tuner chip is specified in Tool Option 4 as the Analog Demod. The digital signal from the tuner goes to the Digital Demod chip specified in Tool Option 4. It takes in the differential signal and completes the demodulation into an MPEG Transport Stream. It is controlled by an i2c link and outputs it's payload over a parallel port to the main chip. Finally the internal speakers are driven by the audio chip in tool option 3. It takes in a digital stream and an i2c control and directly drives the speakers. Lacking a datasheet the best information about the hardware is probably the GPL Linux source. Some are in the mainline kernel. lgdt3305 DTV Demodulator These are the devices that LG supplies drivers for. Custom MStar modules: 8051 Embedded 8051 Microcontroller. They appear to have used a free 'lite' compiler which may explain the 8051_lite references. The compiler has an 8K size limit but it appears the part has the same limit. aeon Unknown avs Application Virtual System Driver Doesn't appear to be used. cc Closed caption decoder This also gets the WSS information but RELEASE doesn't process it through. ci Conditional Access module/CI/CI+ Appears to be PCMCIA based. I don't have one anyway. Looking at the schematic it looks like the stream from the tuner goes through this module so the the decrypted stream should be coming into the system just like a clear stream. So it should be very recordable. emac Ethernet MAC I don't have one of these either. fbdev Will eventually be a full framebuffer driver. ge Graphics Engine Appears to have a fairly basic set of 2D graphics primitives. gop Seems to produce overlay windows of arbitrary size, position and color depth. Includes blink. gpio General Purpose I/O A driver to directly set/clear pins on the SoC. h264 Decodes h264 Video frames iic Talks to i2c serial eeproms, tuner, etc. ir Full driver for IR Remote jpeg Decodes JPEG, normal and progressive mad Audio processor Processes analog, SPIDF, MPEG2, MP3, AC-3, WMA, DTV and hints at passing through DTS if crude "if 0" stuff is fixed. micom Appears related to the 8051 above This has some of the IR, keyboard, LEDS and controls power. References to the control link via HDMI. miu Protects RAM for DRM purposes? Also might be Memory Interface Unit, i.e. required for all ram access. mlink mpool MALLOC Driver Interface msmailbox MS Mailbox Driver mvd Looks like MPEG Video decoder mvop References to h264 and RealMedia? nand Driver for NAND memory. Why? Linux already provides? pwm Driver for 4 Pulse Width Modulation generators built into chip. For example, one drives the backlight. rld scaler Hardware scaler This is where to look into overscan, WSS and all sorts of interesting things. Looks like almost all video goes through here. This does the bulk of displaying video except for the video overlay for the OSD. spi Drives Serial flash memory using the SPI protocol. system tsp Transport Stream Processor Has references to files, PVR mode, lots of fun stuff. ttx Teletext driver vd Decodes analog video ??? ve Video Encoder This doesn't appear to be used. No video out plugs. But European sets with SCART plugs apparently can connect the set to a VCR and record from the internal tuner.