Chip makers are taking very different approaches to combining satellite navigation and a portable media player.
While UK chip designer 3Dlabs has launched a chip for 3D graphics in satnav, along with playing high definition video, NXP and Tensilica are aiming at low cost systems.
The former Philips Semiconductor division has launched the PNX0190 media processor based on its Nexperia platform. This includes NXP Software's swGPS Personal GPS software and ALK Technologies' CoPilot navigation software - providing everything a designer needs to build a low-cost, portable media player (PMP) with navigation capability for connected consumers on-the-go.
The control and baseband software all run on the one chip, reducing the system cost.
swGPS Personal can supply continuous position updates every second to ensure smooth tracking, cold start times of below 35 seconds and the algorithms can be tuned to suit automotive or pedestrian use. The chip also supports MP3 playback, standard and high-definition video playback and recording, FM radio, image tank, and gaming.
The first chip from 3D labs for this market, the DMS02, can handle HD playback at 720p resolution and encode standard definition TV to the MPEG4 standard.
“The performance for HD encode is roughly the same for standard definition D1 encode - they balance out quite nicely,” said Nick Murphy, vice president of architecture. “But we can see how it will scale to 1080i or 1080p.”
It uses two ARM926EJ cores as the host and applications processors and three clusters of eight 32bit dedicated image processing engines.
“Our engineering teams were asked to deliver a breakthrough in handheld media processing and the DMS-02 shows we have achieved just that,” said Hock Leow, president of 3DLABS. “ The ability to play back a full 720p resolution H.264 video on your HDTV from a portable device consuming less than 1 Watt is an incredible achievement. Combine that with rendering 3D navigation at 30 fps, capturing and encoding H.264 video at D1 and performing 4.8 GFLOPS of compute and you have a real testament to the architecture. We believe this architecture has the ability to scale and address the rich digital media content that consumers are constantly demanding in low powered mobile devices.”
Tensilica has launched a new core, the Diamond388, aimed at high volume consumer portable media players (PMP). The 388 is the first commercial core to handle transport demux and setup and CABAC and CAVLC entropy encoding in software entirely in the core to reduce the power consumption by minimising bus accesses. CABAC is usually is handled by a hardware accelerator.
The core uses a VLIW variant of the Tensilica core as a stream processor with dedicated instructions for the CABAC, and a SIMD core to handle the pixel processing, with both running at under 200MHz in a 130nm process for standard definition, D1 resolution, main profile H.264 video or MPEG4 advanced simple profile encoding.
Tensilica also dismisses HD for this market. “Three to five years from now HD may move into the phone and portables but for the designs we see in portable for the next two years, the majority and the volume will be at D1 resolution,” said Steve Roddy, VP of marketing.
For more information, visit www.3dlabs.com
"