TI's OMAP platform transforms ordinary houses into smart, interactive homes

CES 2012 LAS VEGAS, USA: Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) pushed forward with the expansion of its popular OMAP 4 mobile processors into the smart home space. Building on its 2011 momentum, which saw OMAP processors empowering some of the hottest smartphones and tablets, TI demonstrates its OMAP smart multicore processor capabilities in four smart home categories: big-screen displays, family video chat, handy household applications, and in-home robotics.

"Like anywhere else, we often use our smartphones and tablets at home. However, we're just beginning to realize the unique usage models the home environment triggers," said Fred Cohen, Director, OMAP user experience team, TI. "The OMAP platform's smart multicore architecture delivers stunning multimedia capabilities, low energy consumption and many cool differentiated features, which help us enjoy new ways to share, view and interact with content in our digital homes – whether leveraging the larger screens in our living rooms or cooking in the kitchen."

The big-screen user experience
From the comfort of your sofa or home office, you can watch everything from premium HD movies to the latest sports broadcast, play interactive games or browse through family pictures snapped with your mobile device – all on a large, full HD TV screen or monitor.

The OMAP4460 processor is an ideal platform to create radically fast and crisp visual experiences. Content can be sent from smartphones or tablets to large HD displays via HDMI or TI's WiLink 7.0 combo wireless connectivity solution. The OMAP 4 platform's smart multicore architecture complements two ARM Cortex-A9 MPcores with a full HD video encode/decode accelerator, powerful graphics core from Imagination Technologies (SGX540 or SGX544), hardware display subsystem and dual-channel LPDDR2 memory to drive such usage models.

Premium content is protected end-to-end through TI's M-Shield security solution, which runs secure services from its trusted execution environment (TEE).

One of the premier applications of these technologies is the realization of wireless display - finally connecting devices peer-to-peer without being bogged down with cord limitations for the ultimate screening experience. At CES, TI is demonstrating wireless display use cases such as "cinema mode" where users beam smartphone or tablet HD video content onto large TV screens.

An augmented wireless display demo from Screenovate showcases an OMAP4460 processor-based TI tablet beaming a game to a TV while simultaneously using the tablet as the game's touch-screen controller.

For users interested in watching streaming, full-HD TV programs on mobile devices, TI has worked closely with MobiTV, Inc. to optimize its premium white-label mobile video platform on the OMAP4460 processor. MobiTV's media delivery technology and friendly user interface delivers multiple video channels in parallel for an enhanced live video experience.

"We are excited to partner with Texas Instruments and to extend our technology to the OMAP platform," said Cedric Fernandes, Vice President of Technology, MobiTV.

"Together we are working to provide secure HD content on the OMAP platform, and to further support TI's commitment to deliver a high-quality product."

Fanhattan is a new digital entertainment discovery service that helps users navigate the increasing number of premium digital content services available on connected devices. Fanhattan chose the OMAP4460 processor to bring its rich and fluid user interface to life, and make discovering, exploring and watching premium entertainment a truly inspiring experience.

"Fanhattan chose TI's OMAP platform not only for its computational and graphics performance and capabilities, but for the world-class support the company consistently provides to start ups such as ours," said Christopher Vinckier, vice president and general manager TV, Fanhattan.

Adding yet another unique opportunity for OMAP platform-based content access, the OMAP4430 processor gained the first 1080p full-HD silicon reference implementation (SRI) certification to play back Netflix premium content on Android Gingerbread last summer. Today, TI revealed that that accolade has now extended to the OMAP4460 processor, which is the first certified processor for Netflix full-HD streaming on Android Honeycomb.

The entertainment experience would not be complete without high definition audio. TI will be the first to demonstrate Dolby's cinematic audio experience on its OMAP4460 processor-based tablet. Leveraging the OMAP processor's ARM Neon acceleration, Dolby technology creates an immersive surround sound and improves dialogue audibility to deliver the first-to-market ultimate HD audio experience on mobile devices.