Jointwave enters Japanese medical equipment market with H.264 video encoder

FREMONT, USA: Jointwave LLC, a leading supplier of H.264 IP core for FPGA and ASIC, and Spinnaker Systems Inc., a top semiconductor intellectual properties (SIP) distributor in Japan, announced that they have jointly gained a design-win in Japan.

Recently, one of the top Japanese medical equipment manufacturers signed a license agreement with Jointwave, which will supply H.264 encoders and relevant IP cores for its product development.

"Jointwave's IP cores provide high video fidelity and reliability, which are both very important for medical applications," said Toru Katagiri, president of Spinnaker.

"We are proud to collaborate with Jointwave, as their highly-efficient H.264 encoder IP core means our customers can use the most cost-effective hardware. This is very important for medical equipment migrations from older MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MJPEG and JPEG2000 technologies to H.264. Working with Jointwave also ensures our customers have the solutions and support required for enhanced product development."

"Working with the Spinnaker team has been very productive," said Paul Qiu, CEO of Jointwave. "Spinnaker has an in-depth understanding of local customers' applications and challenges. This allows us to penetrate the Japanese market with our video codec IP cores, which have been successful in the US and China."

Jointwave provides video codec IP cores across many different industries. The company's H.264 encoder IP core supports full HD video (1080p) on a single, low-cost FPGA device, such as Altera Cyclone-III or Xilinx Spartan-6, and can be in implemented on 230nm processes for ASIC.

It uses a small amount of memory and has low-memory bandwidth. A precise bit rate control function is built-in and works without external CPU or DSP intervention. All of this makes for a low chip count and a reliable solution. Its low latency is ideal for real-time and interactive applications.

Jointwave's codec works well with pattern recognition and video analytics technologies because of its high-objective video quality. Jointwave's highly efficient CABAC and CAVLC entropy engines support throughput up to hundreds of megabits per second (Mbps), which is very useful for applications that require visually lossless video.

Other attractive features include a small footprint, low power consumption, a low clock rate, high subjective video quality, multiple channels and easy integration.

This innovative H.264 implementation is targeted at automotive, avionics, IP surveillance, medical equipment, mobile device, news and broadcast contribution, video conferencing and consumer electronics.

Jointwave also supplies multiplexer, audio codec and other IP cores that complement a complete solution.

Spinnaker is Jointwave's distributor in Japan. The company distributes Jointwave's entire line of IP cores and evaluation kits, as well as provides consultation and support to Japanese customers.