Digital Consumer
Portable Media
Overview
Die size and battery lifetime is 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-Based™ 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 their 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 and several other unique portable media applications around the world. In Korea, the popular combination is PMP media playback with T-DMB mobile TV reception and GPS navigation. The commercial devices that offer all these 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 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 the radio communications functions and the other runs the various user applications. Multimedia entertainment, camera function 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 Solutions
MIPS 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 34K™ 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 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-SOC™ 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 CorExtend™ feature which allows designers to augment the MIPS architecture with specialized user-defined hardware that effectively defines new native instructions.
Audio Solutions
Overview
Audio is everywhere. Mobile phones, televisions, STBs and DVD systems all handle audio. In the past, adjunct DSPs were used for handling audio next to the host CPU, but code maintenance has become an issue and with today's outstanding performance in 32-bit RISCs, DSPs are being designed out. Project managers realize that standardizing on a single software development suite reduces their integration risk considerably and speeds time to market. Furthermore, RISC programmers are more generally available in contrast to DSP programmers that tend to be further fragmented by their favorite DSP architectures.Challenges
Running audio on RISCs is not necessarily straightforward. RISCs are not inherently as efficient as DSPs for signal processing and RISC programmers tend to not be the ones who are familiar with hand-coded assembly to optimize performance. Thus the burden is on the C compiler to be effective in code optimization. Also, algorithms are typically supplied by their owners, upon licensing, in C code that uses DOUBLE and FLOAT data types. Converting the floating point arithmetic to integer or fractional format is time-consuming and tedious. Most important in audio applications is that the resulting audio output sounds clean and meets high quality standards.MIPS Solutions
Popular audio algorithms used in the entertainment industry have been optimized for the MIPS32® instruction set. Most of them are available directly from MIPS and several are available from ecosystem partners such as Dolby Laboratories, Microsoft, Fraunhofer, Coding Technologies, SRS Labs and Sonic Solutions. Microsoft delivers MIPS-optimized Windows Media directly in Windows CE and also makes this available standalone to those who are not using Windows CE. Dolby and MIPS have worked out a successful cooperative business model. Dolby licensees get the generic audio code from Dolby, but can come to MIPS to obtain the MIPS-optimized versions that have already passed Dolby approval testing. Some very interesting results have just been published that demonstrate the advantage of multi-threading on MIPS cores such as the 34Kc™ processor. Dolby Digital (AC-3) and SRS TruSurround XT were cascaded as often may be the case in a STB design.
Video Solutions
Overview
Video appears on "three screens" today: computer, mobile phone and television. Our customers are particularly interested in mobile devices ("the small screen") and digital living room ("the big screen").The Sony PSP, centered on MIPS-Based™ silicon, was the world's first to bring 16:9 widescreen feature films to your back pocket. Apple finally added video to the popular iPod series and this triggered a host of other PMP IC vendors to prepare such solutions. The endgame for mobile video is generally seen to be mobile TV, using broadcast standards such DVB-H, T-DMB/S-DMB, ISDB-T, MediaFLO and DMB-TH to combine the world's two most successful electronics products ever: the mobile phone and the television. Additionally, 3GPP is preparing fully network-based mobile TV capability that broadcasts to anywhere worldwide using HSDPA and Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS) over 3G networks. The expectation is not to watch feature films on a phone, but instead to snack on clip-casted material, watch podcast episodes or "mobisodes".
HDTV has been talked about since the 1980s, but as large format display panels have appeared on the market at affordable costs, HDTV finally has commercial traction. Broadcasters have been migrating premium channels to HD format and packaged media (HD DVD, Blu-ray Disc™) titles are starting to appear on retail shelves. Regulatory administrations around the globe have scheduled the sunset of analog TV broadcasting in favor of more spectrum-efficient digital transmission. New video compression schemes such as H.264/AVC enable the transmission and storage of HD content within reasonable bandwidths. Those in the IC business of HDTV, STB and DVD consider MIPS as the industry standard processor architecture due to the proliferation of the MIPS architecture and the widespread MIPS Ecosystem.
Whereas previous video coding standards were developed in parallel, the flagship H.264/AVC video codec is officially the first to be jointly developed and standardized by both the ITU-T from the telecommunications industry and by ISO/IEC from the computer industry. Adoption has quickly spread across all industries including broadcast, mobile phone, packaged media and network streaming. The main challenge in commercial availability of products is that H.264/AVC is an extremely complicated algorithm to implement well with a small die size and reasonable power consumption.
Challenges
Video compression is one of the most challenging signal processing algorithms today with H.264/AVC and its many options at the top. Numerous companies have been launched to invent and commercialize new silicon architectures, resulting in a wide choice of solutions, none of which address all the markets optimally. Solutions targeting the small screen run baseline profile algorithms and those targeting HD screens must implement additional technologies to address the high profile algorithm and the massively greater amount of data to be moved. For small screen, decode-only applications, a MIPS32 core has ample processing horsepower to decode video purely in software. For encoding, the complexity is beyond any cost-effective RISC and hardware acceleration is required to offload at least certain tasks to adjunct silicon. The amount of programmability in video solutions is an important trade-off to consider. The standards incorporate many tools where users can modify parameters depending on the application, the visual quality desired and the implementation cost guidelines. Furthermore, the standards are evolving as errata, addenda and new parts are constantly being added.MIPS Solutions
Many video IP vendors are vying to collaborate with MIPS, but picking the right vendors is a difficult task. First, although all claim to have scalable solutions, the reality is that specific solutions are optimal for specific markets and no one solution fits all. Secondly, getting the algorithm right with good visual quality is not trivial. Years of effort are required to get a real-time demo up and running that can stand the tests of real world signals. Today MIPS is engaged with a variety of video IP vendors, each of which have their sweet spots and differing product schedules. Please contact Strategic Marketing to learn about the current status of the due diligence in progress for video solutions in the mobile space (small screen) and in the digital living room (large HD screen). Ask also about application notes for accelerated JPEG image decoding and H.263/MPEG-4 software decoding optimized for MIPS.
