Automotive Mobile Audio Video

Consumers hungry for high-quality mobile video entertainment can look to Freescale Semiconductor (NYSE:FSL) (NYSE:FSL.B) and Chips&Media for the optimal mobile video experience. The companies plan to combine Freescale's processor performance and battery life leadership with Chips&Media's MPEG audio and video technology, which is expected to enable a new class of high quality, low power mobile video entertainment devices.

As part of the long-term portfolio licensing agreement, Chips&Media and Freescale plan to work together to define multi-standard video codecs to drive very high resolution video applications in wireless and portable devices, such as next generation mobile TV devices, portable video players and digital camcorders.

"We sought a long-term agreement with Freescale because of their multimedia engineering expertise, low power innovation, market position and applications processors roadmap," said Dr. Joonho Jesse Lim, president and CEO of Chips&Media. "Our advanced video multi-codec technology integrated in i.MX processors gives customers a very compelling system solution to capitalize on the burgeoning mobile entertainment market."

Mobile TV is set to grow to a $1 billion worldwide market by 2009, with an annual growth rate of 12 percent to 17 percent, according Credit Suisse First Boston, May 2005. To address this high-growth market, the two companies plan to work together to develop next generation video IP blocks that are expected to be integrated into future Freescale i.MX multimedia applications processors. This is expected to enable high quality digital multimedia technology and highly integrated multi-codec technologies on MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and H.264 standards with best-in-class digital video compression.

"Freescale's industry leading i.MX family of applications processors, combined with Chips&Media's expertise and video codec technology is a winning formula," said Berardino Baratta, general manager of Freescale's Multimedia Applications Division. "Chips&Media's MPEG-4 and H.264 codec adds real value to our considerable portfolio of video IP and gives us broad coverage for high performance video processing in low power, mobile handheld solutions."

The need for Smart Speed

The mobile entertainment market space is enjoying explosive growth, enabled in part by significant improvements in processor design and performance. Handheld devices available today provide equivalent performance to the laptop computers of three years ago -- although battery life is lagging behind performance demands.

To meet this challenge, Freescale's i.MX family is engineered to achieve a balance between performance and long, long battery life. Its Smart Speed processor architecture impels video acceleration to drive high performance video applications at very low power in mobile devices. The Smart Speed crossbar switch in the i.MX31 multimedia applications processors virtually eliminates wait states and enables the processor to attain equivalent performance to processors with clock speeds up to 3.5 GHz, but without the power consumption penalty that goes with higher operating frequencies.