Companion processor supports video editing on the phone
By Graham Prophet, Europe Editor -- EDN, February 19, 2009
Semiconductor start-up Movidia has announced the MA1110 multimedia processor for mobile phones. The MA1110 operates as an attached processor to the baseband or to another applications processor in medium- to high-end phone designs to enable high-performance in-phone-video postproduction in real time on low power budgets.
The concept supports social-networking applications on phones in which users capture, edit, and publish video without using a PC. The chip includes interfaces to dual cameras with resolution as high as 12M pixels, the host processors, displays, and external memory when necessary; 1.4 Mbytes of memory is on-chip. The chip has a host RISC processor and extensive graphics-manipulation IP (intellectual property) hard-coded into silicon. It performs complex video-editing tasks, such as real-time image stabilization, super-resolution zoom, slow motion, and color matching.
The MA1110 also supports the high resolutions of all standard audio and video codecs and APIs (application-programming interfaces) to ensure full compatibility with a range of content, and it can perform transcoding between the standards.
Movidia has first silicon now and expects to offer production-quality silicon for sampling by midyear. The chip consumes approximately 200 mW when performing intensive graphics operations, the company predicts.
