Oxford Semiconductor Multimedia Processor Creates Fast Access AV Data Storage Products

Business Wire, August 18, 2004

ABINGDON, England -- Oxford Semiconductor's OXAV940 multimedia processor enables high quality audio and video data to be recorded directly onto an in-product hard disk, offers non-linear editing facilities and provides ultra-fast upload and download via integral FireWire 800 and USB2.0 interfaces.

Achieving a processing capacity equivalent to more than 24 billion instructions per second, the AV940 handles full MPEG4 (I, P and B frame), MPEG2, MPEG1 and DV encoding and decoding at D1, 704 x 576 resolution. For PC and Mac playback, the chip can also encode in the QuickTime(TM) MOV file format.

A highly integrated device, the multimedia processor features a programmable video CODEC, IDE interface, SDRAM controller, CCIR656/601 digital video and image sensor interface and ARM940T core in a compact 288-pin BGA package. The high performance ARM9 processor provides developers with the means to introduce a variety of highly differentiated AV hard disk products, including DVRs and camcorder backups.

The AV940's 100MHz IDE interface offers direct connection to a hard disk, optical disk or other ATA/ATAPI storage device. Device drivers enable the storage device to be automatically recognised by a MAC or PC as an external drive over AV940's 800Mbps IEEE 1394b (FireWire 800) and 480Mbps USB2.0 links, enabling ultra fast video data transfer. The chip is also capable of SBP3 isochronous data streaming over FireWire.

The multimedia processor's video output is a CCIR656/601 digital stream (supporting OSD or non-OSD streams) and audio I/O connect directly to standard audio DACs and ADCs. AV940's video interface can take in a CCIR656/601 digital data stream or 12-bit video data from 300kpixel to 4.4Mpixel image sensors.

The AV940's integral CODEC stage compresses this high resolution image data received into standard formats including MPEG4, for storage onto hard disk. Data processing speeds are fast, with MPEG4 encoding achievable at 30 frames per second at 704x480 NTSC resolution and 25 frames per second at PAL 704x576 resolution.

Oxford Semiconductor's AV940 multimedia processor is backed by a complete software development suite comprising reference design, SBP2 and USB 2.0 bulk storage drivers, FAT32 file systems support and GNU C tools. Using the chip's on-board ARM9 processor, developers will be able to customise sample graphic user interfaces supplied using standard third party development tools to create highly intuitive GUIs.