News and New Products

Graphics core slims down for cellular

By Brian Dipert -- EDN, 3/3/2005

Graphics chips that implement a traditional polygons-to-pixels pipeline offer full compatibility with years’ old APIs, but they also require huge transistor budgets and gobble up lots of memory density and bandwidth. This trade-off is acceptable for PCs, perhaps, but it’s intolerable for embedded cores within SOCs (systems on chips) in high-volume and cost-sensitive consumer-electronics applications (see “Getting glitzy with graphics for embedded systems,” EDN, April 1, 1999, pg 79). Tile-based alternatives from companies such Bitboys Oy (www.bitboys.fi) and Imagination Technologies (www.imgtec.com) may have had underwhelming success at past PC experiments, but they’re leading the charge into multimedia-rich cell phones, PDAs, and similar systems.

Add Falanx Microsystems to the list, with a unique twist: the ability to share the functions of a single set of transistors across both graphics and video tasks. According to President and Chief Executive Officer Borgar Ljosland, “Falanx can implement, in silicon budgets ranging from 190,000 to 400,000 gates, the same functions that require 600,000 to 1 million gates with competing solutions.” The company’s second-generation Mali 55 (back-end-triangle setup) and Mali 110 (setup plus front-end transform and lighting) cores, binary-compatible with their predecessors, accomplish this objective with a power consumption budget of 0.2 to 0.5 mW/MHz on a 90-nm process with a 1.2V core voltage (Table 1). They can implement 4× FSAA (full-scene antialiasing) with no performance or power-consumption penalty, and they can support as much as 16× FSAA. Further hardware acceleration is possible using the separate Mali geometry core. Compatible APIs and video codecs include OpenGL ES, OpenVG, and OpenMAX, which the Khronos Group (www.khronos.org) developed; SVG (scalable vector graphics); Java M3G; Microsoft’s D3D Mobile; and various MPEG-4 profile proliferations.

Falanx Microsystems, 1-603-264-3438, www.falanx.no.