OT ST to demo Nomadik apps processor at CDMA Congress
By John Walko
EE Times
December 4, 2003 (12:48 p.m. EST)
LONDON - STMicroelectronics will demonstrate its Nomadik multimedia application processor - and development boards for it - at next week's CDMA Congress in Florida. The company said today (Thursday 4th December) that it has already sampled several potential customers with both the board and the STn8800 chip.
The processors, which use an innovative architecture based on smart accelerators, enable portable terminals such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants to play music, take pictures, record video, and host two-way visual communication in real time.
Nomadik application processors are all compliant with the open standards now being developed by the MIPI Alliance created in July 2003 to standardize hardware and software interfaces for application processors. ST is one of the four founding members of the MIPI Alliance, which was created in response to broad interest in the earlier OMAPI initiative launched by Texas Instruments and ST in December 2002.
The Nomadic processors include interfaces for CMOS image sensors, wireless connectivity, smart cards and other peripherals. The architecture is scalable, allowing the addition of new features in future implementations and also to be implemented in reduced feature-set versions.
The next version, scheduled for release in the first half of 2004, will include a new selection of digital audio and video CODECs plus enhanced security support.
The processors are based on the combination of an ARM926EJ core together with programmable 'smart accelerators' that operate independently and concurrently to handle the key video and audio coding functions, including pre/post-processing. This distributed processing approach simplifies software development because developers typically need to write code only for the CPU.
The architecture supports the popular operating systems for mobile devices, including Symbian OS, Microsoft WinCE and Linux
The programmable audio smart-accelerator implements the main industry-standard digital audio encoders and decoders including MP3, SBC, MPEG2-Layer II, AAC, and many others. The programmable video smart accelerator supports H.263 and MPEG-4 CODECs using an extremely optimized ST proprietary technology. The new H26L (H.264) standard will also be available in future Nomadik implementations.
