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Imagination Technologies Powers 3D for NXP Set-Top Box platform

7th January 2010

ES Admin

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With increasing competition for new and existing subscribers in pay-TV services and with the penetration of over-the-top video services, operators are anxious to deliver a differentiated user interface through 3D graphics technologies. At the same time, both STB vendors and operators are looking to adopt Adobe Flash and other web user interface technologies into next generation service delivery platforms, driving the need for OpenGLES2.0 compatible STB devices. NXP’s PNX847x/8x/9x SoC family is uniquely tailored to enable a range of economical STB platforms delivering both traditional pay-TV operator capabilities with advanced OpenGLES2.0 3D graphics technology and system performance.

“The new NXP Set Top Box family helps operators and manufacturers capitalize on some of the most exciting market trends, including personalized multi-screen services, while ensuring rich navigation and improved multimedia and Internet TV experiences,” said Christos Lagomichos, executive vice president, Home business unit, NXP Semiconductors. “By working with Imagination Technologies, we are able to provide our customer a cost-effective and easy-to-design platform to render advanced programming navigation user interfaces, games and other 3D content.”

Leading home electronics product designers are increasingly exploiting graphics acceleration as a ‘must-have’ feature for advanced user interfaces, content navigation, gaming, Flash 10 acceleration and more. This latest NXP family of SoCs is destined to set new standards, featuring our latest high-performance POWERVR SGX 531 graphics acceleration core to deliver outstanding graphics for digital home applications using the latest OpenGLES 2.0 shader-based graphics,” said Tony King-Smith, vice president of marketing, Imagination Technologies. “We are delighted to be working closely with NXP to deliver advanced 3D and Flash acceleration capabilities for next-generation mainstream HD STB and DVR products.”

Imagination’s POWERVR SGX531 graphics GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) provides a powerful and flexible solution for all forms of graphics processing, including 3D, 2D and vector graphics, advanced anti-aliasing and image processing. It supports all major industry standard APIs including OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1 and OpenVG 1.1 from the Khronos Group.

POWERVR SGX graphics cores achieve class-leading performance by using an advanced technique known as Tile-Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR), resulting in significantly lower power consumption and system bandwidth demands, while also delivering superior throughput under widely varying system latencies. POWERVR cores divide the screen into small tiles so that more processing can take place on-chip rather than in external memory, creating a high performance yet power efficient solution capable of delivering advanced console class graphics.