Imagination Technologies is presenting its comprehensive array of technologies targeted towards mobile system-on-chip devices this week on its stand at the 3GSM World Congress.
Imagination Technologies is presenting its comprehensive array of technologies targeted towards mobile system-on-chip devices this week on its stand at the 3GSM World Congress 2006 in Barcelona, Spain. Says David McBrien, VP Business Development, Imagination Technologies: ‘At 3GSM 2006 we have the latest game and user-interface content for mobile multimedia processors running on Linux, Symbian, Java and Windows Mobile operating systems’. ‘We are debuting both accelerated OpenVG support for PowerVR and our latest multistandard Mobile TV receiver platform as well as showing some of the latest end user products, including a wide range of PowerVR enabled mobile phones from major brands’.

Imagination Technologies cores are available to implement each of the key mobile technology areas.

All the cores are available as soft IP and ship with synthesis scripts, a verification test suite to ensure correct implementation of the design in SoCs, and hardware implementation and user guides.

Imagination is demonstrating this world-leading technology for mobile devices in application areas including: mobile graphics; mobile TV; mobile video cores; mobile multimedia; and digital radio and audio.

Imagination’s partners will also be showing the latest content and devices based on Imagination’s technology including: Acrodea, Aspyr Media, Esmertec, Fathammer, Freescale, Futuremark, HI Corporation, Intel, Lagardere Active, Pulse Interactive, Renesas, Samsung, SKTelecom, Sony Ericsson, Superscape, TAO, TAT, Texas Instruments and The Code Monkeys.

Continues McBrien: ‘We have developed a portfolio of innovative silicon and software technology which is bringing advanced capabilities to today’s multimedia and communication devices’.

‘As well as being deployed by our licensees in a wide range of mobile applications processors this technology is powering hundreds of OEM products, making the mobile world more compelling than ever before’.

Imagination Technologies, one of the world’s top ten IP companies (source: Gartner), provides PowerVR IP to partners including Centrality Communications, Freescale, Intel, Philips, Renesas, Samsung, Sunplus and Texas Instruments.

Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR MBX is the de-facto standard for 2D/3D graphics acceleration in the mobile multimedia market, from mobile phone handsets to PDAs and in-car infotainment systems.

PowerVR MBX is used by the majority of the top ten semiconductor companies in the world for their mobile graphics solutions.

Using tile-based rendering, PowerVR MBX delivers full hardware acceleration of 32bit pixel blending, hidden surface elimination, multi-texturing, anisotropic filtering and texture compression.

The optional vertex geometry processor (VGP) provides programmable vertex shading.

PowerVR MBX is fully compatible with all industry standard graphics APIs.

Reference implementations are available for OpenGL ES on SymbianOS and Linux; Direct3D on Windows CE; MGL (PowerVR native API) on SymbianOS and Linux; Java3D; and OpenVG.

PowerVR SGX, the new generation PowerVR shader based graphics and video technology family, targets the requirements of mobile embedded graphics and video processing.

It is based around the fully programmable multithreaded Universal Scalable Shader Engine, enabling a feature set that exceeds the requirements of OpenGL 2.0 and Microsoft Shader Model 3, enabling 2D, 3D and video processing in a single core.

All PowerVR graphics solutions from Imagination Technologies are backed up with dedicated support - both technical and co-marketing - for content developers and publishers across multiple hardware platforms and software environments, providing an enviable base of 3rd party content.

Imagination’s Kurosawa mobile TV platform is a low-power demodulation platform for multi-standard mobile TV - supporting DVB-H, T-DMB, Enhanced Packet Mode DAB and ‘One Seg’ ISDB-T.

Built around the UCC Mobile (Universal Communications Coprocessor) core, which provides PHY layer demodulation, the Kurosawa platform also integrates hardware to support the DVB-H Link Layer and an MTX embedded controller for system housekeeping.

Kurosawa provides a complete demodulation solution, from digitised IF or I/Q input, through demodulation and error-correction, to provide multiple DMA IP datagram output streams for DVB-H, and MPEG-2 transport stream for T-DMB and ‘One Seg’ ISDB-T.

The PowerVR MVED1 core combines a multistandard video decode accelerator suitable for baseline profile H.264, Advanced Simple Profile MPEG-4, and Main Profile MPEG-2, with an encode accelerator suitable for baseline profile H.263, baseline profile H.264, and Simple Profile MPEG-4.

Both encoder and decoder support up to SD resolutions.

For playback-only applications, the PowerVR MVDA2 is an efficient multi-standard video decode accelerator, designed to accelerate decode of MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VC-1 (WMV9) and H.264 video streams, offloading the processor from this CPU-intensive task and reducing system power consumption.

Multi-standard HD decode, implemented completely in hardware, is supported through the dedicated PowerVR MSVDX core.

The PDP Lite (pixel display pipeline) has been developed to enable video and graphic content from multiple sources to be displayed simultaneously with very high quality and a small footprint, providing separate graphic, video and cursor planes that target a QVGA to VGA resolution display.

The digital radio platform from Imagination Technologies is the de-facto standard for DAB digital radio, and supports DAB/DRM digital radio, as well as soft FM and soft AM radio reception.

The platform also supports pause, rewind and record of live digital radio as well as an electronic programme guide (EPG), allowing the digital radio to act as a personal radio recorder.

The platform is built around the UCC Mobile core and META RISC/DSP processor, and supports all major digital audio decode and processing standards, with DSP software running on META, facilitating the integration of digital radio and digital audio to create the next generation of personal media players.

The revolutionary multi-threaded architecture of META allows the execution of multiple threads, enabling multiple time-critical DSP-rich applications and non real-time general purpose tasks to run concurrently on the same processor, reducing power consumption and silicon area whilst increasing throughput.