SAN JOSE, Calif. — Emblaze Semiconductor has rolled out its third-generation application processor for mobile phones and other handheld devices. Among other multimedia features, the chip can capture and play back high-quality video in various formats, the company said.
One of those video formats is H.26L, which is considered a successor to MPEG-4. Some large network operators, such as Japan's NTT Docomo and South Korea's SK Telecom, have expressed interest in the standard, said Alon Ironi, president of Emblaze (Ra'anana, Israel).
"It's better than MPEG-4 in quality and compression ratio," he said.
But its unclear how soon it will be adopted because the MPEG and ITU standards bodies are debating what patents to recognize and how to award royalties. H.26L was developed by both groups.
Operators "don't want to deploy the standard because they don't know what to expect in terms of the royalties," he said.
Emblaze's ER4525 chip can also deliver MPEG-4 video and encode JPEG. The company considers video processing its forte, and has added on chip coprocessors that correct and conceal errors and refine picture quality. Moreover, the chip can capture video in CIF format at 15-frames per second and play it back at 30 frames per second.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is manufacturing the chip using 0.13-micron design rules; the previous generation used 0.18-micron design rules. The process shift allowed Emblaze to drop the core voltage down to 1.2-V. The I/O can be set to 1.8-, 2.5- or 3.3-V.
Lowering the core voltage provided enough headroom to boost the speed of its core CPU, an ARM926EJ, to 235-MHz. The company's previous device had to be throttled from 200 to 144 MHz in order to reduce power consumption, Ironi said.
In practice, this means the chip consumes between 50 and 60 milliwatts when accelerating audio and video in QCIF format. With the larger CIF format, power consumption jumps to 100 milliwatts, Ironi said.
Another key piece of the ER4525 is the software package, which consists of 10 software programs such as video mail, audio players and a photo editor. "The life cycle for a cellphone for any given model is nine months, and the design cycle is about the same. [Customers] don't have time to develop the software themselves and they don't even have time to outsource it," Ironi said.
Housed in a 232-pin FlexBGA package, the ER4525 is priced at $10 in volume quantities.
