Startup develops encoder for mobile video apps

By
CommsDesign.com
(04/23/02, 11:55:16 AM EDT)

OTTAWA Atsana Semiconductor emerged from stealth mode Monday (April 22) to describe a media processor that encodes video signals for delivery to mobile handsets over wireless networks.

The company hopes its packet array processor will solve the power challenges that video encoding has heretofore placed on mobile handsets, said chief operating officer Michael Krause. Up to now mobile video has largely concentrated on decoding video streams such as MPEG-4, as that's a less-intensive computing task than encoding and is hence easier to implement in a power-constrained mobile environment, the company said.

Interest in mobile video is growing, and several handset manufacturers have developed mobile phones with embedded digital cameras, making a move to embedded video cameras a logical step. In addition, the rollout of 3G networks in Japan is making bandwidth available to deliver video capabilities.

Atsana, formerly named Lumic, has developed a media processor that employs a single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) architecture. Rather than have one large processor with many pipelines, Atsana's solution incorporates hundreds of smaller processors that are arrayed together. "The programmable array processor is developed around a distributed memory architecture," Krause said. "The processors only have access to their neighbor's memory, not the entire memory array."

Unlike pipeline architectures that break tasks down and simultaneously process elements of a data stream, Atsana's SIMD architecture has all processors execute a single task in a single clock cycle. This approach excels when a single task needs to be executed on an entire image, Krause said. In a case of color correction, for example, the SIMD processor can use all of its elements to restore colors on a single image.

Reduced power consumption is one result of this approach. "While it may take more cycles to execute a series of tasks, each cycle is more power efficient," Krause said. The chip will consume less than 100 mW of power when encoding an MPEG-4 at QCIF resolution, he said.

Atsana said it will initially target its processor for use in wireless video cameras and in camera accessory modules. Over time, however, the company sees a strong embedded opportunity for the product, and sees the accessory module market as a stepping stone to embedded mobile units, Krause said. Handset manufacturers are looking to implement video with a single-chip encoder, he said.

To make its processor more attractive for embedded applications, Atsana has entered a pact with OmniVision Technologies Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.), a developer of CMOS camera sensors. The companies will build a reference design that employs OmniVision's sensors and Atsana's media processor.

Atsana's first media processor will be available in September, featuring a core with a 2.5-V operating voltage and I/Os that are 3.3-V tolerant. The processor will support MPEG-4, JPEG, and H.26L encoding.