Automotive Mobile Audio Video

Renesas Technology Corp. today announced its decision to incorporate Microsoft Corp.'s digital audio and video codec technology, Windows Media Audio and Video 9 Series, and RealNetworks' Inc.'s digital audio and video codec technologies, RealAudio(R) 10 /RealVideo(R) 10, into the SH-Mobile Series of application processors for next-generation mobile phone systems.

These two technologies are widely used in such devices as PCs, PDAs and portable players, and their inclusion in the SH-Mobile, one of the world-leading application processors, will enable them to be installed in mobile phones, greatly increasing their market penetration. Meanwhile, for Renesas Technology, having the SH-Mobile implementation of these two technologies in a mobile phone system will make it possible to support multimedia content player functions and distribution services, and offer optimal solutions for simple construction of systems linked to information devices such as personal computers, to meet the constantly growing demand for multimedia services in the mobile phone market.

In the initial production phase, the SH-Mobile software product based on Windows Media Audio 9 Series technology is to go on sale in March 2004. The features of this product are as follows.

(1) Software decoder supporting Windows Media Audio 9

(2) Processing optimized for the SH-Mobile (40 MHz CPU load in 128

kbps/44.1 kHz/stereo data case)

(3) System and application building simplified by provision of

C-language interface

Following on from inclusion Windows Media Audio 9, Renesas Technology plans to include support for Windows Media Video 9, RealAudio 10 and RealVideo 10 technology based products in the near future.

Renesas Technology will continue to release SH-Mobile Series models in line with mobile phone developments, and to respond to customer needs by expanding our range of support to offer enhanced solutions to a variety of multimedia demands.

About Renesas Technology's SH-Mobile

Renesas Technology's SH-Mobile is a flexible application accelerator that provides multimedia support for next-generation cellular phone communications. Unlike a traditional baseband CPU method that uses a single CPU to manage both signal and application processing, the SH-Mobile design approach uses a dual CPU architecture that dedicates one CPU to application execution in order to maximize communication performance. Built on Renesas' popular SuperH 32-bit RISC superscalar architecture, SH-Mobile devices offers compelling functionality such as the JPEG, MP3, acoustic echo canceller, AMR codec, MPEG4 encode/decode and Java Virtual Machine capabilities that are essential for supporting the high-end multimedia applications of next generation mobile phones.