NEC Electronics Expands Lineup of SoCs For Portable Audio/Visual Devices

The EMMA Mobile 1-D device is a single-chip solution that integrates all the features necessary for playing multimedia content. It is particularly targeted for the mobile device market with a reduced package size of 12.7 millimeter (mm) x 12.7mm, approximately 20 percent smaller in package size than previous NEC Electronics mobile SoC products. The EMMA Mobile 1-D also integrates embedded DRAM in the same package, greatly reducing the effort of mobile device system designers and improving the time-to-market for product deployment.

The EMMA Mobile 1-S, an SoC without embedded DRAM, is also available, which enables the flexibility of memory configuration to adopt several applications.

According to Techno Systems Research 2008, the worldwide market for portable A/V devices, such as multimedia players and mobile televisions, has been growing rapidly, from 10.0 million units in 2007 increasing at an annual rate of 35 percent to 25.0 million units in 2010. At the same time, the features and performance of embedded digital still cameras and digital video cameras have been improving remarkably. These evolving portable A/V devices are expected to create a new market that offers robust multimedia processing capability.

NEC Electronics has a proven track record of developing its successful EMMA SoC product lines to enable advanced home digital AV appliances such as digital televisions and DVD recorders. As a result from the same expertise in hardware and software technologies, NEC Electronics introduced the EMMA Mobile 1 in November 2008 as a new member of the mobile multimedia processor product line. The EMMA Mobile 1 incorporates a high-end ARM CPU core ARM1176JZF-STM, a dedicated digital signal processing (DSP) core, and an advanced H.264 function block. As a mobile-phone SoC provider, NEC Electronics also implements its state-of-the-art low power technology into the EMMA Mobile 1, capable of decoding and playback MP3 and AAC audio contents and video contents on a D1-size screen (720 x 480 pixels) at 30 fps, at an outstanding level of low power state.

The EMMA Mobile 1-D will meet the stringent design and features-rich requirements for today’s mobile digital AV devices. It will also enable NEC Electronics’ to strategically focus on the portable devices market, providing customers with a solution to design high performance, competitive products with incredibly short time-to-market. An evaluation kit will be available through collaboration with partner companies.