Ceva (San Jose, Calif.) said its Mobile-Media-Lite family, which builds on the company's Mobile-Media architecture, targets a range of applications including mobile TV players and entry-level personal media players (PMPs) and multimedia phones.

"We are very proud of the fact that all of this family is just for mobile," said Eran Briman CEVA's senior director of strategic marketing. "There is a big difference in whether you are aiming at the wired or mobile market."

The first offering in the Mobile-Media-Lite family is the MM2200, described by Ceva as an integrated, single processor multimedia solution. In this solution, all multimedia-related processing as well as application and system tasks are handled by a single processor, eliminating the need for additional processors, Ceva said.

Ceva said the new family of solutions also responds to customer desire for cost-effective multimedia solutions for low-cost mobile consumer electronics. The MM2200, which is optimized for the burgeoning mobile TV player market, supports H.264 decode at CIF resolution of 30 frames-per-second (fps), while simultaneously decoding an AAC stream and synchronizing the audio and video, according to Ceva. MM2200 also supports MPEG4 decode up to VGA resolution 30fps, the company said.

"There's a big rush for MP4 players in China," Briman said. "It's become a very fashionable device."

Ceva said a second member of the Mobile-Media-Lite family, the MM2100, would be introduced in the near future. Specifically designed for heterogeneous architectures that already include a CPU, the MM2100 utilizes CEVA's multimedia technology as a dedicated multimedia co-processor, supporting H.264 decoding up to standard-definition quality in addition to a complete set of audio and imaging codecs, Ceva said.

The Mobile-Media-Lite solutions are fully programmable platforms that feature a Ceva-X1620 DSP core, a small set of level one associated memories, a multimedia-optimized DSP subsystem, a complete suite of optimized multimedia codecs and a multimedia applications layer, Ceva said.