Portable Media
Overview
Die size and battery lifetime are everything. MIPS Technologies is a pioneer of outstanding performance on a battery-sized budget. The Sony PSP is a beautiful showcase of MIPS technology. The world's first PMP to support Adobe (Macromedia) Flash was a MIPS-BasedTM device. One of the first, if not the very first, PMP to run Windows CE was also a MIPS-Based device. The #2 MP3 SoC manufacturer in the world, Actions Semiconductor, licensed MIPS® cores to expand its business beyond just audio. The widely popular Alchemy Au1200 chip first from AMD, and now from RMI, has captured a majority market share in the Korean PMP market as well as in China. In Korea, the popular combination is PMP media playback with T-DMB mobile TV reception and GPS navigation. The commercial devices that offer all three services in one package are using MIPS cores and running Linux. Samsung used a MIPS-Based IC to launch the world's first HDMI-enabled digital camera. What all these successes have in common is outstanding performance packed in the most efficient silicon solution with the smallest die size.
Challenges
Price, power and performance ... the 3 Ps ... form the litmus test in portable media applications. Driven largely by the mobile phone market and portable digital electronics such as MP3 players and digital cameras, portable technology must address the toughest challenges at a price point that is under extreme competitive pressure. To be most useful, portable digital audio/video devices must be able to accept any of a long list of possible audio and video formats. This forces the solution to not only be cost-effective and battery-efficient, but it must also have enough memory and store enough code to be able to handle the multitude of possible audio and video coding standards out in the market. The current mobile phone architecture is based on two processors. One of them handles radio communications functions and the other runs the various user applications. Multimedia entertainment, camera functionality and GPS navigation are popular examples of applications quickly becoming "must haves" in the medium to higher end phones. Mobile TV is expected to marry the two most successful electronic products ever brought to market: the mobile phone and the television.
MIPS® Solution
MIPS Technologies is especially known for efficient silicon architectures and thus the highest performance in the smallest space with minimal current consumption. The MIPS32® M4K® core can be synthesized down to just 30k gates and still deliver excellent performance at ultra low power consumption. On the other end, the multi-threaded 34KTM core can perform as if a multi-core design, but using only a single core. As such, this dramatically reduces die size and power consumption, yet delivers unparalleled performance.
Mobile entertainment is all about supporting media codecs. All the major audio coding algorithms are available in a core-agnostic, MIPS-optimized form either directly from MIPS or from selected MIPS Ecosystem partners. JPEG decoding for images has been accelerated using MIPS-optimized software. Video codecs in many formats are available from ecosystem partners, both in software and in hardware form. Digital rights management and other security aspects are handled with the Safe-SOCTM Platform. Linux as well as popular RTOS solutions are supported across the MIPS32 product line. A key advantage that has especially been exploited by portable media designers is the CorExtendTM feature that allows designers to augment the MIPS architecture with specialized user-defined hardware that effectively defines new native instructions.
MIPS Technologies also offers a complete line of analog and mixed-signal IP, from wireless to power management to audio to connectivity interfaces like USB and the new HDMI 1.3 IP solution for portable devices-enabling HDMI to go mobile!
