Ittiam Systems Announces the Availability of High Performance Multimedia Codecs on the ARM Cortex-A8 Processor

Audio and video solutions empowered by the ARM NEON technology

Bangalore. September 18, 2008 -- Further pushing the limits of multimedia capabilities for portable and entertainment devices, Ittiam Systems, a member of the ARM® Connected Community™, today announced a new set of high-quality and high-performance audio and video codecs for the ARM Cortex™-A8 processor with ARM NEON™ technology.

Based on proven reference C models for various platform implementations, the codecs have been developed to provide an enhanced user experience with high-definition (HD) resolutions due to the powerful acceleration provided by the NEON technology.

The product offering includes MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VC-1/WMV9, H.264 and MJPEG video encoders and decoders; audio codecs ranging from stereo AAC, MP3 and WMA to certified implementations of high fidelity codecs such as AC-3 5.1, WMA Pro 7.1 and AAC-HE 5.1. These codecs can be augmented with a set of post-processing quality enhancement tools.

Utilizing the NEON SIMD media processing extensions, Ittiam's video codecs offer standard definition (SD) performance of all popular video decoders and HD performance of MPEG-4 SP decoder and at significantly lower clock speeds, achieving two to three times improvement over earlier-generation implementations. These performance enhancements are a good path towards HD decoding with all major formats on future generation of high performance devices.

Using the ARM RealView® Development Suite 3.1 Professional tools, Ittiam was able to optimize its codecs for NEON technology before and after silicon availability. The simulation models and RealView Profiler tools helped to identify, efficiently optimize and validate the compute intensive blocks of the codecs, enabling Ittiam to deliver time-to-market benefits for customers.

Ittiam's broad codecs portfolio with HD decoding capabilities as well as VGA encoding enables a rich multimedia experience in the mobile phones, Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), portable navigation and entertainment devices.

"Combining our rich multimedia knowledge, ARM architecture expertise and the ARM development tools, we have developed codecs with really compelling performance and power to drive the next generation handheld and mobile applications," said Shantanu Jha, Vice President, Media Processing at Ittiam.

"The ARM Cortex-A8 processor with NEON technology is shipping now and is becoming widely accepted as the leading processor in multimedia applications ranging from smartphones and mobile computing devices to HDTV," said Ian Drew, VP marketing, ARM. "The availability of Ittiam's audio and video codecs optimized for the NEON architecture extension will help further accelerate the adoption of NEON technology-enabled processors, such as the Cortex-A8 processor, as well as future ARM processors in next-generation multimedia devices."

"TI has a long-standing relationship with Ittiam during which they have developed multiple software solutions for our system-on-chip products," said Charlie Gonsalves, Developer Network marketing manager, Texas Instruments (TI). "For either ARM or DSP enabled multimedia capabilities, their product offering allows customers to leverage the performance of the ARM NEON technology found in the ARM Cortex-A8 processor and to achieve extended performance with DSP accelerated products. This allows customers to have the right level of performance for a low price point on processors like TI's OMAP35x processors."

Complementing the multimedia codecs, Ittiam offers an integrated Media System Software that eases the design of multi-format audio-video playback, streaming and recording applications. Built using Ittiam's media engine, the middleware with multimedia codecs, file parsers, streaming stacks, Digital Rights Management, and content management is available on Linux and other popular operating systems. Designed for performance and scalability, the framework accommodates a wide range of applications and is portable across single and dual core ARM processor-based devices.

The codecs and middleware are available for licensing from 4Q'08 and will be demonstrated at several upcoming trade shows starting September 2008.

About Ittiam

Ittiam Systems Private Limited, headquartered in Bangalore, is a technology product company singularly focused on digital signal processing systems in media and communication. The company operates through its network of offices and representatives around the world. Ittiam's customers include Fortune 100 companies and are distributed across U.S., Europe, Japan and Asia. Since 2004 the company has been consistently rated as the 'World's Most Preferred DSP IP Supplier' in the annual surveys conducted by Forward Concepts Incorporated. In 2005 Ittiam had been selected by Red Herring into the top 100 private companies in Asia. In 2007, Ittiam received the NASSCOM India IT Innovation Award, a prestigious recognition of the company's innovative product designs. For more details, visit www.ittiam.com.

About the ARM Connected Community

The ARM Connected Community is a global network of more than 450 companies aligned to provide a complete solution, from design to manufacture and end use, for products based on the ARM architecture. ARM offers a variety of resources to Community members, including promotional programs and peer-networking opportunities that enable a variety of ARM Partners to come together to provide end-to-end customer solutions. For more information, please visit www.arm.com/community.

About the Texas Instruments Developer Network

Ittiam Systems is a member of the TI Developer Network, a community of respected, well-established companies offering products and services based on TI analog and digital technology. The Network provides a broad range of end-equipment solutions, embedded software, engineering services and development tools that help customers accelerate innovation to make the world smarter, healthier, safer, greener and more fun