Taiwan’s Magic Pixel licenses MIPS processor IP for advanced multimedia apps

TAIWAN & USA: MIPS Technologies Inc., a leading provider of industry-standard processor architectures and cores for digital consumer, home networking, wireless, communications and business applications, announced that Magic Pixel Inc., a leading supplier of advanced multimedia SoCs, has licensed the MIPS32 24KEc and 4KEc Pro Series processor cores for development of next-generation digital photo frames (DPFs) and other portable multimedia applications.

"Tomorrow's multimedia products will offer functionalities such as video decoding, multimedia content rendering and wireless connectivity-requirements that necessitate a high-performance, low-power processor," said CH Ma, CTO, Magic Pixel.

"MIPS Technologies' considerable market presence and expertise in multimedia applications, the proven performance and energy efficiency of its cores, and its robust third party and software ecosystem including Android support will help us quickly create innovative and highly-competitive solutions."

Michael J. Palma, IDC senior research analyst for consumer semiconductors, said: "MIPS Technologies provides the leading architecture platform for digital multimedia solutions. The MIPS architecture is the market share leader in processor architectures for digital TVs, digital cable set-top boxes, digital satellite receivers, digital video recorders, DVD players, Blu-ray disc players and IPTV set-top boxes.

"For these product segments, the MIPS architecture accounts for well over half of all processors. MIPS is also the number one processor architecture for connectivity solutions including Wi-Fi, DSL consumer premises equipment (CPE) and cable modems."

"With the leading processor architecture for multimedia applications, and our tangible progress in driving Android into new markets, MIPS is ideally and uniquely positioned to meet the needs of the next generation of multimedia applications in digital home and portable markets," said Art Swift, vice president of marketing for MIPS Technologies.

"The Asia Pacific region continues to be MIPS Technologies' fastest growing region, and leading-edge companies like Magic Pixel contribute to our success as we expand our reach into new and rapidly growing markets."

MIPS32 4KEc and 24KEc cores
The highly configurable MIPS32 4KE core family offers a high-performance solution in a small footprint. The MIPS32 24KE core family leverages the high-performance 24K microarchitecture and adds the MIPS DSP Application-Specific Extension (ASE), resulting in improved signal processing performance and efficient DSP capability, while significantly reducing overall SoC die area, cost and power consumption.

The 24KE cores are supported by software development tools, the MIPS DSP Library and a third-party DSP applications network.

MIPS Pro Series cores allow SoC designers to write their own instruction set extensions to significantly increase performance, reduce power consumption, implement critical operations and more, leading to highly differentiated and competitive products.