Portable Media
Portable Media Player (PMP) solutions must be cost-effective, battery-efficient, and have the requisite performance to handle the wide variety of audio and video coding standards in the market. Multimedia entertainment, camera functionality and GPS navigation are popular applications that are becoming must-haves in today’s PMPs, and mobile TV is also increasing in popularity. The challenge for today’s system designers and system integrators is combining all of this high-performance functionality in the most efficient silicon solution with the smallest possible die size.
Where can you find us?
The Sony PSP is a showcase of MIPS® technology. The world’s first PMP to support Adobe (Macromedia) Flash was a MIPS-Based™ device. One of the first PMPs 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 Corp., 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.
MIPS Solutions - Processors
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 MIPS32® 34KTM core can perform like a multi-core design, but it uses only a single core. As such, it 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 Technologies 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, in both 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 been especially exploited by portable media designers is the CorExtend® feature that allows designers to augment the MIPS architecture with specialized user-defined hardware that effectively defines new native instructions.
