Marvell Technology Inc (MRVL)

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Voices: Marvell's Nikhil Balram: A "visual-pipeline" view
http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6437967
MOBILE VIDEO

The Nokia N800 tablet measures 5.67×2.95×0.51 in. and has a crisp, 800×480-pixel display that spans nearly the entire front of the unit. We all know by now about Apple's iPhone. The latest generation of Pocket PCs also touts VGA LCDs, albeit not wide screen, and both cell phones and portable media players, such as Microsoft's Zune, are also inevitably going the high-resolution route. Yet, especially in large portions of the United States and other areas of the world lacking widespread mass transit, the fundamental usage model is unclear to me. Unlike with a dedicated audio player, you can't use one of these devices while you're multitasking—walking or exercising, for example, and most definitely not while driving. And the small screens, no matter how crisp, seem incompatible with aging populations' dimming eyesight. What's your take on the potential for mobile-video success, and is it to some degree geography-specific? In Asia, for example, mass transit is pervasive, and various cultural factors also encourage isolated multimedia-content consumption.

I agree that the popularity of mobile video is very strongly connected to geography and culture. Almost all of us who work in urban areas have 'lost time' that is spent commuting. Clearly this lost time can't be used to watch video in a region like Silicon Valley where you have one person per car. On the other hand, it is an interesting option for people using mass transit in dense-population areas like Tokyo.

However, I think the real story with mobile video is the portability of your personal video library. As you know, the iPod and other MP3 players opened the door for consumers to carry their entire audio libraries with them so that they could listen to their preferred content anytime and anywhere. The introduction of a variety of audio docks created a rich and complete audio ecosystem, enabling the consumer to listen to favorite music at home through a high-performance AV system, in a bedroom or dorm room through a small speaker system, or anywhere on the road through headphones.

Hard drives continue to increase in density and decrease in cost. One can already buy PMPs [portable media players] that have 80 to 160 Gbytes of storage. If you assume your content is in SD resolution (640×480 pixels) encoded in H.264 at 1.5 Mbps, as is typical of iTunes movie content, you can store 100 hours on an 80-Gbyte video iPod and 200 hours on a 160-Gbyte PMP. In the likely case of a mix of QVGA and VGA content, one could store even more than that. The implication of so much storage in such a convenient form factor at such a low cost is that a consumer could carry his video library with him at all times, just as he does today with his audio library. Why would he do so? Certainly not just to watch video on a tiny screen on the road. He might, however, if there were an easy way of watching the content anywhere, including on a TV in his home, in a hotel room, or at a friend's house. To do this, he needs a new class of dock: an HD-video version of the traditional audio-PMP dock.

This [type of dock] is exactly what we demonstrated at CES with our lead partner, Meridian, a very-high-end audio-video company. Click here for a picture of this dock. At CES in January, we launched the 88DE2710 adaptive digital-video-format converter that can upconvert all types of video and graphics content from QVGA to 1080p. As mentioned earlier, one of the key focus areas for us is to make low-resolution video look good on a large, high-resolution display. At the same show, Meridian demonstrated a prototype of an iPod HD dock that used our 88DE2710 to upconvert iTunes video content from the iPod to 1080p displayed on a Sharp 46-inch 1080p LCD TV. This concept and demo were very favorably received, and we have been working closely with a number of manufacturers that want to bring this device to market this year.

To summarize, I think a device like the HD dock, makes 'mobile video' into a much bigger and all-encompassing category, with mobile consumption or viewing only being a small piece.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Marvell had a diverse product line when it launched its new video-processing IC family at CES. For example, the company offered wireless networking, storage ICs, and the ARM-based CPU line it acquired from Intel and recently expanded. Is it to much of a stretch to assume that Marvell's future plans encompass combining your imaging expertise with other building blocks in the company's portfolio to create new devices for particular markets and applications? What can you share about Marvell's integration vision?

Marvell's diverse technology and product portfolio enables our platform approach for these new product categories, which can encompass a variety of Marvell silicon. A great example is the Seagate DAVE [digital-audio-video-experience] microdrive targeted at the cell-phone market. DAVE has both a Marvell applications processor and Marvell Wi-Fi.

From the video perspective, as a company, we are working on the entire visual pipeline: from image acquisition to preprocessing, compression and decompression, storage, transfer between wired or wireless devices, postprocessing, and display. As you know, various CE devices require some or all pieces of this pipeline. The fully featured cell phone is one example of a CE platform that could use this entire pipeline.