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Tensilica Ports MPEG-4 BSAC Decoder to HiFi 2 Audio Engine

16th October 2007

Tensilica

ES Admin

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Tensilica has announced that it has added a MPEG-4 Bit Sliced Arithmetic Coding decoder to it's HiFi 2 Audio Engine, the most popular commercial audio core for system-on-chip designs. This BSAC decoder is used in Digital Multimedia Broadcasting applications, which allow radio, TV and datacasting to mobile devices, particularly mobile phones.

DMB is on the rise, with popular services in South Korea and Germany, trials in Paris, Norway, Italy, Indonesia, and Ghana, and service plans in China for the 2008 Olympics, stated Larry Przywara, Tensilica's director of mobile multimedia. By providing this decoder, we can save device manufacturers the time and effort of developing the decoder themselves, getting them into volume production quicker.

MPEG-4 BSAC was standardized by ISO/IEC 14496-3 subpart 4. BSAC replaces the Huffman coding portion of the conventional AAC standard used for noiseless coding of scale factors and spectral data. The rest of the processing is identical to AAC. It offers fine grain audio scalability in the range from 16kbps to 64kbps in steps of 1kbps per audio channel and provides error resilience for greatly improved audio quality of a signal transmitted over an error-prone channel such as a wireless network.