IndigoVision announce AMBA interface for Mainstream MPEG-4 Video Codec

July 1, 2004 - IndigoVision the Edinburgh, Scotland based designer of the market leading Mainstream MPEG-4 Video Codec today announced the release of an AMBA (Advanced Micro-controller Bus Architecture) interface for their Mainstream MPEG-4 Video Codec. The new AMBA interface allows an SOC designer to connect the Mainstream MPEG-4 Codec onto an AMBA V2.0 compliant bus and provides an AHB (Advanced High-performance Bus) bus master which is used to set-up and control the Codec operation and an AHB Slave to allow the Codec to save and retrieve digital video data over the AMBA bus from system level memory.

The new AMBA interface is available as an option to Mainstream Licensees and can replace the existing 16 bit flexible Host Interface and 32/16 bit SDRAM interface in Mainstream to give designers a wider choice of system interface.

Steve Wright, IndigoVision ASIC Manager commented "the release of the AMBA interface allows our customers to easily connect our Video Codec to a wider range of microprocessors, including ARM, and will help to speed-up their products time to market. Since the release last year of the Mainstream MPEG-4 Video Codec we have achieved significant sales success in the far-east where designers have appreciated our Codecs superior video performance, the low power consumption and the low loading our design places on the system host microprocessor. Here at IndigoVision we operate a strict policy of testing and verifying all our IP before announcing availability and to maintain our high quality ethos to IP supply this new AMBA interface, as with all our IP, has already been tested and verified by both ourselves and a lead customer".

IndigoVision's Mainstream IP is a silicon proven, high performance, MPEG-4 Codec designed for ASIC and SOC applications and is fully implemented in hardware and autonomous in operation. Mainstream IP captures and encodes digital video to the MPEG-4 Simple Profile standard and goes beyond Simple Profile to support Advanced Simple Profile features for high resolution 4SIF/D1 size images at full 25/30 fps frame rates. Mainstream is highly scaleable enabling the same core to support products ranging from low-power mobile phones to PDA's, camcorders, digital set-top boxes and digital still and video cameras.

An encoder and decoder together with a full range of matched IP video modules are available in HDL source or RTL code together with test-benches, software simulators and Demo/development PCB's.