While the jury is still out on whether consumers will want to watch streaming video on the small screens of their wireless devices, Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc., along with its parent company Toshiba Corp., launched a silicon MPEG-4 decoder enabling designers to create wireless communications products that can receive and decode streaming media.
“MPEG-4 is a world standard, delivering high quality audio and video streams,” said Andrew Burt, wireless market development director at Toshiba America. “It also provides very high error resistance which is very applicable to wireless streaming of content.”
The device, which Toshiba claims is the first on the market, integrates an MPEG-4 decoder with 4 megabits of embedded DRAM in a single-chip solution. Toshiba said its expertise in embedded DRAM technology enables it to reduce power dissipation due to the lower capacitance on-chip connections, without any degradation in the chip’s performance.
Consisting of a 16-bit RISC processor and dedicated hardware accelerators, Burt said the device performs 15 frames per second on MPEG-4 decoding with 176 pixels by 144 pixels at 30 megahertz clock frequency, making it suitable to multimedia equipped wireless devices including cellular phones, personal digital assistants and real-time remote security and surveillance solutions.
While the 15 frames per second potential of the decoder is not quite motion picture quality, Burt noted that it was much better than the 11 to 12 frames per second possible with current technologies. In addition, Burt said the decoder was designed to work with screens in the 1-inch to 2-inch range that are commonly found on small, wireless devices.
“The main uses for this type of technology include new markets and products we have not even seen yet, but are being developed,” Burt said. “As cellular providers look towards ways to drive up the use of cell phones, they will look towards these types of services.”
Burt acknowledged that U.S. wireless subscribers may not benefit from this technology for some time until third-generation services are introduced, but noted that the Japanese market will see 3G implementation next year, with Europe following soon behind.
“It’s definitely an interesting product,” said Adrienne Downey, an analyst at Semico Research. “It’s positioned very well for 3G phone use in the Japanese and European markets, though the release may be too soon for the U.S. market, where their competitors will have time to come up with competing technologies that may prove superior.”
Toshiba said it would release pricing options on the decoder by mid-December, with samples ready to ship by March.
