Amphion Semiconductor Ltd., a vendor of semiconductor intellectual property for digital video, imaging and encryption, has joined IBM Corp.'s Blue Logic IP Collaboration Program. Established in March 2002, the program offers third-party IP cores for advanced-system products directly from member companies, for integration into ASICs manufactured by IBM.

Amphion has implemented customer designs for MPEG-2 in IBM's 130-nanometer process technology. "We're seeing an increase in the number of complex SoCs [systems-on-chips] built around our IP cores, and they aim right at advanced semiconductor processes," said Stephen Farson, vice president of engineering at Amphion (Belfast, Northern Ireland). "We have achieved excellent implementation using the IBM tools and methodology."

Amphion offers its MPEG-4, MPEG-2 and Motion-JPEG IP cores through the Blue Logic program. The cores use stream-based architectures to accelerate bit stream performance while greatly reducing area and power consumption, claims Amphion.

The CS6700 series of MPEG-4 video encoder and decoder cores complies with ISO 14496-2 Simple Profile Levels 1-3.

Amphion clams the cores are highly optimized. For example, Level 1 decoding in 130-nm technology, including post-processing and color space conversion, consumes less than 8 milliwatts at 12 MHz and requires less than 120k gates, claims Amphion. The codec has become popular with cell phone chip set providers that need to add video. Performance can extend to support VGA resolution.

The CS6600 series of MPEG-2 cores is finding sockets in consumer electronics products, the company said, especially digital televisions and displays, set-top boxes, DVD players and digital video recorders. In 130-nm technology the decoder can support up to four simultaneous MP@ML elementary streams or two simultaneous 422P@HL high-definition streams, making it a cost-effective solution for applications migrating into the HD video market, Amphion said.

Amphion said its CS6100 cores are fully compliant with Baseline JPEG image compression and offer faster-than-real-time image processing. In 130-nm technology, the company said, the cores compress and decompress full-color images at 60 frames per second with compressed-image quality comparable to "I-frame-only" MPEG-2. The company said the CS6100 cores have become popular in digital cameras, cell phones, satellite systems and even HDTV broadcasting.

Michael Santarini is senior editor covering electronic design automation for EE Times.