Mirics targets ARM processor-based smartphones with FlexiTV

FLEET, UK: Mirics Semiconductor announced that it is developing mobile TV and radio solutions for smartphone applications by migrating its FlexiTV platform to the ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 applications processors.

In targeting the ARM Cortex applications processors, Mirics will enable low cost, region independent mobile TV and radio reception on media-rich phones, thereby marking Mirics' first step into the cellphone market with software-based TV and radio solutions.

Smartphones represent one of the fasting growing segments within the cellphone market, and market research firm ABI Research estimates that the total market size for such devices could exceed 200 million units in 2010 alone.

Following Mirics' announcement last week of FlexiTV support for the Intel Atom processor, this latest development for the ARM Cortex applications processors demonstrates Mirics' on-going commitment to enable platform agnostic broadcast content, whilst substantially reducing the cost and footprint of adding TV and radio reception.

Mirics CEO, Simon Atkinson, said: "Rapidly growing consumer demand for the widest range of media-rich content on portable devices has seen the evolution of smartphones from voice-centric devices into multi-media entertainment platforms.

"Mobile TV and radio are therefore content applications naturally well suited for support on smartphones. The ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 processors are the de-facto standard embedded applications processors for cellphones enhanced with multi-media functionality, so the architecture was the natural choice for us to target with FlexiTV."

ARM executive vice president of marketing, Ian Drew commented, "We believe that the combination of the Cortex applications processors' low power multicore architecture and NEON media processing engine, together with Mirics' software-based FlexiTV demodulator provides the low cost solution to the challenge of delivering multi-standard mobile TV reception on smartphones."

Mirics stated that its initial smartphone-based solutions will address the Korean and Japanese mobile TV standards -- T-DMB and ISDB-T OneSeg, respectively -– which have achieved by far the greatest geographic penetration. Mirics expects to sample FlexiTV solutions based upon the Cortex applications processors to lead customers in the 4th quarter of 2009 with production being ready for early 2010.