Vivante Corp. IP Catalog

Vivante Corp.

Vivante Corporation is a Sunnyvale, California based IP supplier focusing on licensable GPU technology. The companies single and multicore GPU cores have been selected by more than 40 SoC vendors worldwide including several of the worlds largest semiconductor vendors to power their next generation products. Vivante offers turnkey GPU solutions including GPU hardware, software, support and a robust ecosystem of application developers.

Vivante technology breaks through the limits of size, performance, and power to help customers deliver unique products quickly and cost-effectively. Our comprehensive series of silicon-efficient, low-power, high-performance GPU cores ensure cutting-edge graphics quality previously available only on PC platforms.

Fully programmable graphics hardware is fast becoming the mainstay in consumer electronics devices. The OpenGL® Shading Language was designed to allow application programmers to express the processing that occurs at those programmable vertex and pixel points of the OpenGL pipeline. Independently compilable units written in this language are called shaders. A program is a set of shaders that are compiled and linked together.

A unified shader architecture enables processing of both vertices and pixels by any shader processor unit. Vivante’s GPU technology is architected from the ground up to deliver a high-precision, true unified shader implementation that maximizes graphics performance and quality per milliwatt of system power consumption.

Robust application support
Access to high-performance shaders without programming limitations is the key to lowering application development costs and developer support costs. Vivante’s high-performance true unified shader architecture delivers best-in-class programmability:

- Full support for the OpenGL Shading Language without Appendix A exceptions
- IEEE 32-bit floating-point computation supports long shader instructions
- Ultra-threaded architecture virtually eliminates pipeline latency
- Fully enabled for Android, Linux, and Windows Mobile deployment

Smaller, faster, cooler
Vivante is the die size leader, offering the smallest OpenGL ES 2.0-compliant silicon footprint on the market. We enable full OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1, OpenVG 1.1, DirectFB, and GDI graphics acceleration in half the area of other GPU cores. Every Vivante GPU delivers the best performance per sq. millimeter in its class.

Vivante offers the lowest power consumption (benchmark performance per milliwatt) GPU available today:

- Ultra low-power microarchitecture
- Frequency scaling
- Software-controllable power states

Optimized to reduce memory bandwidth and minimize load on the CPU, Vivante GPUs use less memory and processing power. Features like full-scene anti-aliasing, unified vertex and pixel shading, and rich texture mapping generate the highest quality graphics:

- Programmable, unified shader with up to 256 threads per shader unit
- Low-power techniques: extensive clock gating, flexible allocation of resources in the shader unit
- Multisample anti-aliasing
- High-dynamic range (HDR) textures

Scalability
Vivante shaders are scalable, due to their highly programmable multi-threaded architecture. And our modular software architecture supports multiple GPU cores with a single driver infrastructure.

Easy to integrate
With support for free-running AXI and AHB interfaces, customers can easily integrate our cores into their systems. Vivante licensees quickly and consistently reach target frequency and optimal final silicon area using provided reference implementation packages for Cadence and Synopsys design tool environments.