SEATTLE — Equator Technology Inc. is developing programmable processor architectures that will add multimedia features to computers and consumer electronics, and it expects to accomplish its work almost entirely in software.

The company hopes its work will find use in high-definition TVs, set-top boxes and interactive 3-D games. Equator is already touting partnerships with a number of high-profile companies: Hitachi on HDTV; Criterion in 3-D rendering algorithms; and with Microsoft on Talisman frameworks and an API for DSP.

"We'll do an HDTV in C — fully in software," said John O'Donnell, president of Equator, based here. The micro-architectures Equator spins out — in effect, VLIW ASICs — will be specifically designed to execute this code.

Equator's embrace of VLIW (very-long instruction word) technology might seem a bold move in light of Chromatic Research's retreat from the technology. The media-processor pioneer has apparently given up its quest to harness VLIW architectures to the needs of multimedia. And Philips' TriMedia group, another media-processor developer, has scaled back the applications of its products to HDTV decoding and videoconferencing.

Chromatic and Philips have approached DSP multimedia from the wrong direction, O'Donnell said. Instead of developing a big general-purpose hardware architecture, and then attempting to get programs to run on it, Equator is developing the software first — and then finding the most efficient hardware to run it.

Equator has extensive expertise with VLIW compilers. O'Donnell was a principal in Multiflow Computer Corp., one of the first minisupercomputer makers to exploit very-long-instruction-word architecture in the 1980s.

The company sees its VLIW-based media processor as something of an application-specific standard part. It will likely show small variations in hardware from application to application, and large variations in software.

Equator's VLIW compiler would allow program developers to do their work in C, and to still get fast performance on a variety of these new microarchitectures. Programmers, O'Donnell said, have become used to the notion that they either need to develop their programs in assembly language, or use a power-hungry processor to get speedy execution on less-efficient programs developed in C. "In terms of productivity, the more we can keep them in C, the better off we'll be." Equator's compiler can tailor the program to a variety of efficient microarchitectures, rather than to a large VLIW machine whose performance may still depend on code that is hand-tweaked in assembly.

"VLIW has a good future," said Will Strauss, who tracks DSPs for Forward Concepts (Tempe, Ariz.).