Trio to develop mobile entertainment SoC platform

"We already have one lead customer and the project is driven by them," said Karsten Popp, chief executive officer of Adelante Technologies. Noting that Philips Consumer Electronics will be the first customer of the ARM/Adelante/Philips platform, Popp said the goal of the three companies is to "finish before the end of this year a proof of concept for the mobile entertainment platform, complete with hardware and software."

The first products based on the jointly-dev eloped platform will be tailored to automotive infotainment systems, and will allow customers to combine a variety of entertainment building blocks such as car audio, video, GPS navigation, Internet access, DVD and a display screen. The companies also hope to extend their common SoC platform into mobile and wireless handheld application areas in the future, Popp said.

The partners already have some experience in the mobile entertainment area. Philips Semiconductors has developed the Nexperia Mobile platform; ARM is developing a range of application-focused platforms based on its ARM processor core. And Adelante, formed last year by the merger of Philips Semiconductors' DSP division with Frontier Design, has been offering DSP technology and application-specific co-processors along with its development tools. But working together on a common SoC platform, the trio believes their solutions can get into the external market more quickly, and give customers access to a programmable platform with deeper app lication-specific intellectual property, said Popp.

Competing chip companies such as Texas Instruments Inc. and Intel Corp. offer similar mobile multimedia platforms, but "they don't license their cores, and they are not open," said Popp. In contrast, the ARM/Adelante/Philips hardware platform is operating system-independent, with open RISC and DSP cores essential to building complex SoCs, plus a host of software and hardware critical to application layers, he said.