Ceva debuts new IP suite for mobile media

By Colleen Taylor -- Electronic News, 3/19/2007

Intellectual property (IP) solutions provider Ceva Inc. has debuted a new IP suite aimed at giving more people access to on-the-go entertainment.

The San Jose-based company today unveiled a new family of application-optimized multimedia solutions for enabling the development of high-volume, low-cost mobile consumer electronics with advanced multimedia capabilities. Dubbed, the new "Mobile-Media-Lite" family offers a complete feature set for a range of applications like mobile TV players, entry-level portable media players (PMP) and multimedia phones, Ceva said.

The company's first offering in the new Mobile-Media-Lite family is the MM2200, which Ceva touted as a highly integrated, single processor multimedia solution leveraged on the company's CEVA-X1620 processor. According to the company, with the MM2200, all multimedia-related processing as well as application and system tasks are cable of being handled by a single processor. Catering to the mobile TV player market, MM2200 supports H.264 decode at CIF resolution 30fps while simultaneously decoding an AAC stream and synchronizing the audio and video, Ceva claimed. MM2200 also supports MPEG4 decode up to VGA resolution 30fps, which allows it to be used in entry-level PMPs and MP4 players, as well.

Ceva said it also plans to soon introduce a second member in the Mobile-Media-Lite family, the MM2100, specifically designed for heterogeneous architectures that already include a CPU. According to the company, the MM2100 utilizes Ceva's multimedia technology as a dedicated multimedia co-processor, supporting H.264 decoding up to SD resolution in addition to a complete set of audio and imaging codecs.

According to analysts, the PMP/MP3 player trend is only going to get hotter in the coming years. The PMP/MP3 player market will grow to 268.6 million units in 2011, rising at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.5 percent from 216.9 million units in 2007, the latest report from market research firm iSuppli Corp. predicts.