ARM aims for portable video market with new buy...

Processor designer ARM has acquired Logipard, a leading Sweden-based video IP company, in a move that provides video acceleration IP to ARM customers.
Logipard designs power-efficient video encode and decode acceleration technologies for the mobile and consumer markets is the leading provider of video IP to one of the world’s leading mobile technology suppliers for platforms used by LG Electronics and two other leading mobile handset OEMs. The Logipard video IP has shipped in more than 30 million mobile phone units to date.
The technology will be combined with ARM's Mali 3D graphics core to bring to market the Mali-VE multi standard video engine family of products, sitting alongside existing ARM processor cores. This is a step away from ARM's focus on using DSP extensions such as NeON for video processing and a move back to the traditional video co-processor approach.
Mali-VE will support the majority of the leading video codec formats and provides peerless encode and decode codec capabilities for image resolutions from QCIF up to High Definition (1080p) as used in the latest high quality camcorders, digital televisions and Blu-ray players.
The technology offers full encode support for H.264 at baseline and main profiles, H.263 and MPEG-4SP, making it suitable for a wide range of end user devices such as mobile phones, portable media players and camcorders. In addition, the flexible architecture enables decoding of High Profile H.264 and all profiles of VC-1 as well as MPEG-2, as required by Internet enabled devices for browsing video content such as YouTube. The programmable nature of the architecture also allows for future standards and new codec tools to be implemented using firmware upgrade only, significantly improving time to market to support new standards in existing designs.
It is available today supporting resolutions up to D1 whilst the high definition 1080p Mali-VE6 solution will be available in the second half of 2009.
“Video acceleration and processing technologies have become critical for the development of many consumer electronics products, complementing the ARM Cortex CPU and ARM Mali GPU IP already incorporated into many high- performance mobile devices,” said Lance Howarth, VP and GM, Media Processing Division, ARM. “Through the adoption of Mali-VE technology, ARM Partners will be able to complement their use of ARM graphics and CPU IP to deliver more efficient system-on-chip (SoC) solutions, whilst reducing risk and accelerating time-to-market.”
“This is a natural next step for Logipard and we look forward to taking the technology to the next level under the ARM brand. Under the guidance of ARM, the world’s leading IP company, we believe we can establish our products as the technology of choice for video coding within mobile devices,” said Linus Wiebe, CEO at Logipard.