Faraday Introduces High-Resolution MPEG-4 Solution for Multimedia Application

High-resolution, Small Footprint and Low Power Consumption IP Core Facilitates Use of Popular MPEG-4 Standard in ASICs

Hsinchu Taiwan, and Sunnyvale CA, June 21, 2004 - Faraday Technology Corporation (TAIEX: 3035), a leading fabless ASIC and IP company, today announced the availability of its MPEG-4 codec IP which achieves 4CIF (720 x 576) resolution at low bit rate for multimedia applications such as camcorders, digital video recorders (DVRs), DVD players, video conference equipments, surveillance products, set-top-boxes, and other media-intensive products.

The MPEG-4 engine includes a video and image compression/decompression IP core, a DMA controller, and a video capture functional block. In addition to this new MPEG-4 engine, Faraday's multimedia platform solution employs an ARM core or other microcontroller, an AMBA bus, and modularized hardware/software IPs, to provide far greater flexibility of being integrated with other functional blocks. The use of a powerful 200MHz ARM core in this platform enables users to integrate other potential media formats into their rich media SoC designs.

"Digital video compression technology has created remarkable growth in the multimedia industry, encompassing a wide variety of media, such as audio, video, images, computer graphics, speech and data or any combination of these," said Dr. Chi-Yi Hwang, VP of R&D and Marketing of Faraday Technology. "Faraday's MPEG-4 solution will enable customers to more readily incorporate video and other media formats into ASICs targeting consumer products."

Specifications:
Faraday's FTMCP100 is a video and image compression/decompression IP core supporting MPEG-4 (ISO/IEC 14496-2) simple profile L0 ~ L3 standard and JPEG (ISO/IEC 10918-1) base-line standard. Depending on the CPU firmware, it can support MPEG4 or JPEG encoding and decoding. The FTMCP100 supports up to 30 frames per second (fps) at 4CIF (720 x 576) resolution; it also supports other standard resolutions (sub QCIF, QCIF, CIF, and VGA) and non-standards on 16-pixel steps.

Faraday's MPEG-4 codec IP also features high resolution, minimum CPU load, a small gate count, small internal memory blocks, and low power consumption. At 4CIF, 30 fps mode, the MPEG4 encode frequency is 85MHz, and the CPU load is 36 MHz. The total gate count is just155K gates. The internal RAM is 10K Byte and External DRAM is 1215K Byte. When manufactured on UMC's 0.18um standard process, the power consumption is only1.2 mW/MHz.

Pricing and Availability:
Faraday's MPEG4 video codec IP is available for verification and licensing now. The list price for a single use license is $250,000 USD, with 25 cents per chip royalty. A certain amount of the license fee will be included in the NRE fee for ASIC customers. For more information, please contact:

Faraday Technology Corporation is a leading silicon IP and fabless ASIC vendor. The company's broad IP portfolio includes 32-bit RISC CPUs, DSPs, PHY/Controllers for USB 2.0, Ethernet, and Serial ATA. With more than 500 employees and 2003 revenue of $111 million, Faraday is one of the largest fabless ASIC companies in the Asia-Pacific region, and it also has a significant presence in other markets, world-wide. Headquartered in Taiwan , Faraday has service and support offices around the world, including the U.S. , Japan , Europe, and China . For more information, please visit: http://www.faraday-tech.com

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