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Product category: Intellectual Property Cores
News Release from: Tensilica | Subject: Diamond Standard VDO (ViDeO) processor engines
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 07 December 2006

Four video processor engines introduced

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Tensilica has introduced four new Diamond Standard VDO (ViDeO) processor engines customised for multi-standard, multi-resolution video in System-on-Chip (SOC) designs.

for ystem-on-Chip (SOC) designs Tensilica has introduced four new Diamond Standard VDO (ViDeO) processor engines customised for multi-standard, multi-resolution video in System-on-Chip (SOC) designs Targeted at mobile handsets and personal media players (PMPs), these video subsystems are fully programmable to support all popular VGA and standard definition (SD, also known as D1) video codecs with resolutions up to 720x480 (NTSC) and 720x576 (PAL) including H.264 Main Profile, VC-1 Main Profile, MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP), and MPEG-2 Main Profile, each of which is available from Tensilica

Lower resolutions such as QCIF, QVGA, CIF and VGA are also supported.

The Diamond Standard VDO engines host all the key video processing functions in software on the cores - including the network abstraction layer, picture layer, slice layer, bit-stream parsing and entropy decoding and encoding.

This includes the computationally demanding CABAC (Context Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding) decoding in the H.264 Main profile decoder that most other solutions omit, implement in a separate and complex non-programmable hardware block or necessitate more than 700 MHz of general CPU workload which significantly increases power consumption.

By implementing CABAC in instruction set extensions, Tensilica was able to create a low MHz and power efficient version of CABAC in less than half the area of a typical CABAC hardware block.

The Diamond VDO family offers both Baseline and Main profile solut