Hantro's MPEG-4 codec added to MIPS cores

Hantro's MPEG-4 codec added to MIPS cores
By Michael Santarini, EE Times
October 23, 2000 (10:23 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20001023S0018

Hantro Products Ltd. (Oulu, Finland), a developer of semiconductor intellectual-property cores, is working with MIPS Technologies Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) to integrate an MPEG-4 codec with the MIPS32 4K family of 32-bit processor cores. Together, the codec and processor cores are expected to form a hardware platform for next-generation screen phones, set-top boxes, Internet appliances and videoconferencing equipment.

Hantro claims its technology (www.hantro.com) provides high-quality video decoding and encoding at 15 frames per second.

It is designed to scale from handheld displays to full television size. The licensable MPEG-4 codec is configurable and scales from being mostly software to being predominately hardware.

"Hantro is pleased to enter the MIPS Alliance Program and partner to deliver next-generation codec technology," said Eero Kaikkonen, president and chief executive officer o f Hantro. "We chose MIPS ( www.mips.com) due to its strong presence in relevant product categories such as handheld PCs, set-top boxes and Internet infrastructure."

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Atmel Corp. (San Jose, Calif.) has integrated its T8xC5101 8-bit microcontroller into Gemplus' GemCore Lite product. Gemcore's GemCore Lite offers manufacturers of set-top-boxes, mobile phones and PDAs a solution that adds smart-card interfaces to their devices.

Gemplus incorporated the T8xC5101, a low-pin-count version of the standard 80C51 microcontroller featuring 16 kbytes of OTP/ROM and 512 bytes of RAM, into its offering to increase performance while saving space and money.

Further information is available at www.gemplus.com and www.atmel-wm.com.