Imagine a low-cost video processor for small screens that requires little energy and still packs a punch. Vivace Semiconductor's VSP100 offers all of these qualities, providing QVGA (240 by 320 pixels) playback in real time at 30 frames per second (see the figure). And since it's quite capable of handling today's compute-intensive standards like H.264, MPEG-4, and WMV9, you can design your next-generation consumer device with confidence.
The VSP100 is designed for portable media players, video cell phones, and other devices where the screen is less than 2.5 in. Powered by a custom tri-core multimedia processor that includes a dual-core DSP engine and a 150-MHz RISC CPU, it offers deblocking, deringing, scaling, rotation, and other post-processing utilities. It also includes an LCD/VGA controller with 32-bit precision for programming the resolution and timing to support several video standards.
With battery life in mind, the VSP100 operates at a low clock frequency. Its integrated power management supports three power modes: active, sleep, and power-down. The end result is a power consumption of only 25 to 50 mW during media playback, and it consumes virtually no power in the idle state. The chip also includes an integrated "video aware" DMA memory controller that is fluent in DDR and SDRAM, so a complete low-power system may be designed around it.
The fully programmable VSP100 includes a complete software development environment with integrated compilers, debuggers, assemblers, and profilers. The device can be purchased with a development platform and reference design that accelerates and eases development, debug, integration, and hardware/software testing.
The VSP100 will start sampling next month with 10,000-piece pricing at about $6.
Reprints
