London, UK -- September 9,2004 -- Imagination Technologies – a leader in system-on-chip intellectual property (IP) – announces new IP for DVB-Handheld (DVB-H), the fast-emerging new standard for digital mobile TV in Europe and the USA.
Imagination offers leading demodulation and video IP specific for DVB-H including the Ensigma UCC (Universal Communications Co-processor) and PowerVR MVDA2 multi-standard video decode accelerator.
Imagination Technologies’ IP enables optimum implementations for low-cost, low power consumption DVB-H devices. With its IP range Imagination can deliver end-to-end mobile TV receiver solutions from demodulation (both PHY and LINK layers) through video/audio decode, and image processing/display to system control and user interface.
A new member of the Ensigma UCC family, specifically designed for mobile applications including DVB-H, enables flexible mobile devices with very low power consumption and silicon area. The high level of programmability provided by the UCC IP makes it capable of supporting the demodulation of a number of worldwide broadcast standards on a single hardware implementation.
UCC’s support for multiple standards on common configurable hardware offers the benefits of both SDR (Software Defined Radio) and dedicated hardware solutions. It combines the flexibility, scalability and upgradeability of software, with the high performance, efficiency and low power consumption advantages of dedicated hardware.
PowerVR MVDA2 accelerates the decode of H.264, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV8 and WMV9 video streams, offloading inverse Zig-Zag, inverse Discret Cosine Transform (iDCT) and Motion Compensation, the most costly stages in video decoding, from the CPU.
By performing the most CPU intensive parts of the video decode task PowerVR MVDA2 reduces the CPU load required for decode by up to 80%, thereby enabling lower cost and lower power consumption systems. The reduction in CPU computing requirements is of increased importance when performing quarter-pel motion compensation as used in modern video compression standards including H.264, which is needed for DVB-H.
Says David McBrien, VP Business Development, Imagination Technologies: “We’ve already proven the capabilities of our market-leading technologies for radio and digital television broadcast and have now turned our attentions to DVB-H and other standards, particularly targeting handheld or mobile phone receivers like single segment ISDB-T, S-DMB and T-DMB. We expect these markets to prove significant in volume and for high-quality mobile video to become as much a part of daily life as mobile audio and communications is today.”
Today the Ensigma UCC core is already successfully shipping in devices targeting the DAB (Digital Audio Broadcast), T-DMB (Terrestrial Digital Multimedia Broadcast) and DVB-T (Terrestrial Digital Video Broadcast) markets. In fact the DAB solution powered by Imagination’s IP cores currently has over 70% of the global market share, with partner Frontier Silicon recently announcing successful shipment of the one millionth device into this market. In addition to this, UCC has been designed into products supporting other worldwide digital broadcast standards and analogue TV.
PowerVR 2D/3D, video or display cores are licensed by many of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers including: Intel, Renesas, Philips, Samsung, SEGA, Sharp, Sunplus and Texas Instruments.
Complete DVB-H SoCs can also, where required, utilise Imagination’s META family of IP processor cores. META provides real-time response while simultaneously supporting efficient multifunction operation and has already been proven a variety of successful low power consumption mobile devices.
Ensigma UCC, PowerVR and META IP is available for licensing individually, for use in combination with partner or third party processor, baseband and video/display solutions, or for use together as a complete solution in SoCs.
