Residential communications of the future has the potential to dramatically change the way people of the world interact and to shape the world in ways that would be barely imaginable a generation ago. The roadmap for cable system services contains multiple functionalities, including digital and analog television, cable modems, personal video recording (PVR), cable telephony, and wireless connectivity that will help drive these changes. The world will become fundamentally more connected on all levels of society and commerce. Designers of advanced set-top boxes that support these services must consider multiple issues such as international protocols, including the cable digital video broadcast (DVB) variant, DVB-C, and the North American OpenCable standards. There are also a number of technological challenges involved in implementing multiple functions in the same hardware, including optimized routing and splitting, supporting multiple tuners, power dissipation, and footprint.