Imagination announces latest POWERVR VXE video encoder IP cores

November 19, 2008 -- Imagination Technologies, a leader in system-on-chip Intellectual Property (SoC IP), announced today the availability of two new IP cores in the POWERVR™ VXE video encoder family. POWERVR VXE251 and VXE280 deliver multi-standard encode at SD and HD resolutions respectively. Both cores are available for licensing immediately.

POWERVR VXE encodes still image and video sequences to a wide range of compression standards including H.264, MPEG-4 & JPEG. These cores offload the entire video/still encode processing to hardware. This minimises the host CPU processing requirements. Despite having multi-standard capability, POWERVR VXE cores typically take up comparable silicon area to single standard solutions.

This VXE family of encoders is ideal for a wide range of consumer and embedded applications including cameras, portable media players, video conferencing, surveillance, personal navigation devices and mobile phones.

One of the unique features of VXE280 is a scalable architecture that allows tuning the number of pipelines to the process specific clock-speed for maximum system efficiency and performance.

POWERVR VXE encoders offer high quality encoding at low data rates, and low power, to enable efficient encoding for the next generation of consumer devices. VXE280 delivers full HD encoding capability that is increasingly demanded in many consumer applications.  The provision of H.264 allows devices using POWERVR VXE to typically offer at least a 5x improvement in recording times of HD video, as compared to today’s devices which use the less efficient M-JPEG algorithm.

The cores encode video and stills from raw image data, producing a compliant bit stream at the elementary stream or NAL unit level; generate stream headers; and perform algorithmic functions such as entropy encoding, scan, transform, motion estimation and compensation, and deblocking.

The cores’ multi-standard support has been tested with a wide range of raw image data to ensure high compression ratios without reduced visual quality. Supported standards include: H.264 BP@L4.1; MPEG-4 SP@L5.0; H.263 P0@L50; M-JPEG Baseline Profile 4:2:2 & 4:2:0; and JPEG Baseline Profile 4:2:2 & 4:2:0.

Advanced design techniques enable the cores to encode full frame rate standard definition whilst keeping clock speeds low: encoding of H.264 BP@L3.0, SD at 30 fps requires just 75MHz, or 150MHz for H.264 BP@L4.1, HD at 30 fps.

POWERVR VXE video encoders contain a powerful real time stream manager, based on Imagination's META MTX 32-bit embedded processor IP core, which performs all header encoding including rate control as well as overall core management functions. The VXE cores’ comprehensive and flexible rate control algorithms include constant and variable bit rate control to match the requirements of the end application. The unique architecture of VXE cores enables future rate control requirements to be met using existing hardware, without the need for new silicon.

Advanced automatic hardware power management techniques including block and register level clock gating ensure that the minimum amount of logic is powered for each video standard. This ensures that the cores have frugal power requirements enabling high performance, real-time video encode to be brought to power constrained devices such as portable media players and mobile phones.

POWERVR VXE cores meet the video requirements of a range of interoperability standards such as 3GPP and 3GPP2, and provide full encoding to JFIF1.1 for use in a wide range of mobile applications.

About Imagination Technologies

Imagination Technologies Group plc (FTSE:IMG) – a leader in semiconductor System on Chip Intellectual Property (SoC IP) – creates and licenses market-leading embedded graphics, video and display accelerators, multi-threaded processors and multi-standard receiver technologies. These IP solutions are complemented by dynamic and extensive developer and middleware ecosystems. Target markets include digital radio and audio; mobile phone multimedia; personal media players (PMP); in-car navigation and driver information; personal navigation devices (PND); Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) and Mobile Internet Device (MID); digital TV & set-top box; and mobile TV. Its licensees include leading semiconductor and consumer electronics companies, as well as innovative leading edge start-up and fabless semiconductor companies. Imagination has corporate headquarters in the United Kingdom, with sales and R&D offices worldwide. See: www.imgtec.com.