STMicro India Develops Multimedia Apps Chips For Hand-held Devices

STMicro India Develops Multimedia Apps Chips For Hand-held Devices SUDHIR CHOWDHARY NEW DELHI: STMicroelectronics India, the Noida-based design centre of Italian microelectronics major STMicroelectronics, has developed a new family of application processor chips that will enable portable terminals or hand-held devices to play music, take pictures, record video, and host two-way visual communication in real time.

According to ST India's managing director Pradeep Kumar, these processors are aimed at 2.5/3G mobile phones, personal digital assistants and other portable wireless products with multimedia capability. In addition, the new family of chips will find applications in automotive multimedia.

Called ?Nomadik', ST's multimedia application processor family offers low-power consumption, which is facilitated by the optimal partitioning of the chip between hardware and software, combined with ST's low-power CMOS (Complimentary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) technology and low-power design know-how. ST India's director for research and development Vivek Sharma told eFE, "This translates into longer battery operation for consumers and performance scalability for product manufacturers."

He added, "The processor chips are based on the combination of an ARM926 (Advanced Risc Microprocessor) core together with programmable ?smart accelerators' that operate independently and concurrently to handle the key video and audio coding functions, including pre/post processing. This distributed processing approach simplifies software development for developers because they only need to write code for the ARM core. In addition, since multimedia functions are not typically executed on the main processor core, there is more headroom for adding new software applications in the future."

According to Kumar, India has of late become ST's hub for developing cutting-edge technology for applications like set-top box, DVD (Digital Video Disk), telecom, multimedia, imaging and automotive among others.

It has already invested around Rs 200 crore in the design centre.

It is also credited for recently developing a complex mixed signal chip called BBJANUS for multi-standard automatic toll application.

It supports Telepass as well as CEN TC278 standard for DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communication).

The circuit and physical design of this chip was completely done in ST Noida and the first silicon is functional and is with Autostrada, Italy, for field test.

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I thought STMicroelectronics is a Swiss company with significant presence in France !!!

Check their website ==========================================================

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