New Programmable Mali200 IP Core From Falanx Microsystems Delivers PC-level Graphics Quality for Mobile Devices

LOS ANGELES -- Aug., 2005 -- At SIGGRAPH 2005 (Booth 1854, Hall J), Falanx Microsystems, Inc., a rapidly emerging force in the mobile graphics/video IP core market, today introduced the first in its new series of 3rd-generation IP cores for System on Chip (SoC) manufacturers. The Mali(TM)200 is a fully programmable graphics and media acceleration core for mobile phones that will take full advantage of the Khronos OpenGL® ES 2.0 programming standard, a new API designed to enable advanced 3D graphics on mobile devices. This support for OpenGL ES and other APIs, combined with the programmability of the Mali200 architecture, will provide mobile games developers with a one-of-a-kind development platform for creating tomorrow's applications.

"Until now, there have been limited tools available to create desktop quality games or applications for mobile phones," said Borgar Ljosland, president and CEO of Falanx. "The fully programmable Mali200 leverages the power and versatility of the most advanced APIs, arming developers with unmatched multimedia capabilities for creating mobile games and applications beyond imagination."

The Mali200 feature set offers rich 3D graphics that go beyond Shader Model 3.0, along with advanced DSP and general multimedia acceleration via OpenGL® ES, OpenVG and DirectX9 among other APIs. This quality and versatility is achieved with a low gate count, which, when combined with power-saving features and the lowest memory bandwidth usage, results in a elegant low-power graphics architecture. Like the rest of the family of Mali IP cores, the Mali200 is a patent-pending single-pipeline 2D/3D/Video IP rasterizer core that delivers 30fps video recording and playback. Mali IP cores offer the industry's only advanced 16X Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) for mobile devices, along with smart texture filtering and compressions techniques for increased bandwidth savings and the ultimate in visual quality.

Scalability on a Grand Scale

With its unique and intelligent pixel processing abilities and modular nature, the Mali200 is ideal for use in any multimedia device requiring high performance and low power, such as mobile phones, personal media players and laptops. This scalability is further enhanced with support for OpenGL ES 2.0, which is designed to bring OpenGL to multiple platforms like set-top boxes, auto navigation systems and even state-of-the-art game consoles such as the "PLAYSTATION® 3." The Mali200(TM) architecture allows for multiple cores to be parallelized in larger footprint SoCs for desktop and integrated graphics processing applications.

"The ability to combine high-quality graphics performance with low power consumption is a very marketable advantage, whether it's mobile devices, game consoles or desktop PCs," said, Dr. Jon Peddie of the leading graphics market research firm Jon Peddie Research, in Tiburon, CA. "Falanx is taking a bold step by expanding into these larger-platform markets, and they clearly have something to offer with the scalability of their 3rd generation Mali IP cores."

"The Mali cores have been designed from the ground up to support programmable shading and other advanced graphics technologies," continued Ljosland. "And with broad spread acceptance of the OpenGL ES standard among multiple platforms, the Mali graphics core can take its natural evolutionary path to full programmability and further leverage its 3D / video performance with the signature image quality and low memory bandwidth usage."

Patented Graphics Architecture

As with all Mali IP cores, the Mali200 employs a combination of tile-based and immediate mode rendering for efficient bandwidth usage, which results in several competitive advantages over using a single approach. For instance, the Mali200 eliminates up to 80 percent of the per pixel bandwidth usage of immediate mode renderers. Additionally, data locality provides optimized memory access patterns ensuring higher performance in high-latency systems.

Compared to a traditional tile-based renderer, the Mali200 IP core offers significantly lower bandwidth/vertex, while its Falanx proprietary FLXTC(TM) Texture Compression method lowers per-pixel bandwidth as well. Falanx' proprietary tiling technique provides bandwidth/vertex similar to an immediate mode render architecture.

These benefits can be mapped into existing system-on-chip architecture with full support for e.g. AHB2.0 or AXI bus interface standards, a complete in-house developed and pre-verified software stack and a unique and patented hardware / software interface providing robust performance and ease of system verification, The modularity and clean cut approach of the Mali solution enables Falanx to adapt the cores on the premises of customers requirements, and provide the maximized value and differentiation of a Mali graphics enabled SoC.

The Mali200 cores will be available for sampling in November 2005.

About Falanx

Falanx Microsystems develops graphics accelerator IP cores, marketed to semiconductor system-on-chip (SoC) vendors, that deliver high quality multimedia images without compromising performance, power consumption and system cost. Unlike most graphics IP cores, Falanx's Mali Graphics Core- designed from the ground-up for mobile applications such as cell phones, PDAs and portable game platforms-is the only graphics IP core offering a complete integration of 2D, 3D and video, plus software and interoperability drivers, in an all-in-one solution. Falanx is headquartered in Trondheim, Norway, and is privately-held. For more information about Falanx and the Mali IP Core Family, visit www.falanx.com

Source: Falanx Microsystems, Inc.