Panasonic Announces Development of A QVGA-supporting MPEG-4
Matsushita Electric, best known worldwide for its Panasonic brand of consumer electronics and digital communications products, and its principle subsidiary Panasonic Mobile Communications Co., Ltd. today announced the development of the MPEG-4 multi codec LSI (MN195906), nicknamed MarvieTM3* standing for an abbreviation of “MPEG-4 Advanced Real-time VIdeo codec Engine.”
Supporting QVGA-sized screens featuring a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels compared to the conventional QCIF-size of 176 x 144 pixels, this new LSI is ideally suited to W-CDMA (Wideband Code-Division Multiple Access), PDCs (personal digital cellular), andother mobile phone terminals. Moreover, it enables the recording, play back, and display of QVGA-sized moving pictures conforming to the MPEG-4 standard while power consumption has been lowered to 60 milliwatts. Users can enjoy high quality movies, conduct videophone conversations, and utilize other video content on a mobile phone for a longer period compared with previous models. Shipment of samples is scheduled to start in October 2003at a price of 5,000 yen.
With mobile terminal screens getting larger and having the capacity to reproduce more complicated data, Panasonic developed this LSI so that the standards of not just the latest but also future equipment can be met. Users can record their partner while videocalling, or play and record internet content simultaneously thanks to its ability tocompress or expand three channels concurrently with its specific circuit (hardware engine), which can perform high-volume or fixed operations, while a DSP (digital signal processor) core performs irregular operations. An on-chip video-editing engine is capable of performing a range of image manipulations such as video editing, resizing, cropping, flipping, and rotating. When the video processing circuit is powered-off, the liquidcrystal can be controlled by the CPU, reducing power consumption while the unit is no tprocessing moving pictures, thus letting users operate for a longer period of time.