New ARC® VRaptor™-Based Video Subsystems Receive Strong Industry Support

Business Wire,  August 13, 2007  

Tags: industry, video

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ST. ALBANS, England -- ARC International (LSE:ARK) today announced that its new Video Subsystems (see related ARC news release dated today) have garnered very favorable reviews by a broad range of leaders throughout the semiconductor industry. They include ARC partners such as Cadence Design Systems, CoWare, Green Hills Software, Magma Design Automation, and Virage Logic. Industry analysts supporting ARC's new Video Subsystems include widely recognized researchers from Forward Concepts, In-Stat Microprocessor Report, Jon Peddie Research, and Semico Research.

Industry Analysts Supporting ARC's New Video Subsystems:

Will Strauss, Forward Concepts

"In the mobile phone market, MPEG-4 and H.264 are preferred among leading phone makers in Europe and Japan and ARC is providing the preferred solutions for the sweet spot in this market. In addition, the new ARC Video Subsystems are exceeding the capability currently offered by high-end $200 packaged silicon by providing SIMD engines in addition to motion estimation, entropy encode and decode blocks."

Tom Halfhill, In-Stat

In her report, "MPEG Video ICs: H.264 in the Limelight," released last month, Michelle Abraham, principal analyst at In-Stat, predicts the MPEG video IC market has plenty of room for growth, with MPEG IC unit shipments expected to increase from 649 million in 2006 to 1.6 billion in 2011. MPEG video ICs are used to compress and decompress video streams in many consumer devices, from small mobile handsets to large digital TV sets. "ARC is smartly moving into a growing market that demands more performance and power efficiency," said Tom R. Halfhill, senior analyst for In-Stat's Microprocessor Report.

Dr. Jon Peddie, Jon Peddie Research

"Shows like 'On The Lot' are an example of how inexpensive cameras, production tools, and Websites such as YouTube are enabling a new generation of Hollywood directors to distribute their creations to millions of consumers. The new ARC Video Subsystems provide the fundamental building blocks to make higher quality video capture ubiquitous on just about every portable media device, further fueling this hot new trend."

Richard Wawrzyniak, Semico Research Corporation

"ARC's new family of encoder/ decoder video subsystems represent several steps forward for designers looking to use IP to craft their next silicon solution. Their very low power consumption coupled with high performance and very small die size make ARC's latest subsystems ideal to incorporate into next generation SoCs requiring high quality video. In addition, their ability to function as the processing element in many applications without needing to interface to a host processor makes these subsystems even more attractive since they can double as processors themselves performing computing functions other than just those specific to the target feature set."

ARC Partners Supporting the New Video Subsystems:

Cadence Design Systems

"Cadence and ARC have been engaged in a close technical collaboration for the past two years under the Cadence Open Choice IP Partner Program," said Michael Horne, group director, Industry Alliances at Cadence. "Our technical cooperation has resulted in the seamless integration of the Cadence Encounter digital IC design platform with ARC's ARChitect processor configurator to the benefit of our mutual customers, including advanced flow and methodology support for low-power applications. SoC designers working with the new ARC Video Subsystems products can select the Cadence Encounter flow from within ARChitect to achieve the highest performance and lowest power possible."

CoWare Inc.

"SoC design has become a daunting task for engineers because of the increased complexity," said A.K. Kalekos, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development at CoWare. Our solution to this challenge is abstracting the complexity via SystemC models. We have been working closely with ARC to ensure its ARChitect tool produces a SystemC model of a customized CPU or multimedia subsystem that integrates seamlessly into our Platform Architect tool. Once imported, Platform Architect speeds the concurrent design of SoCs with embedded software. We're excited to be offering our customers the ability to rapidly create and validate SoC designs based on the new ARC Video Subsystems at the transaction level in SystemC."

Green Hills Software

"Green Hills has a long history supporting software development for ARC cores and subsystems and we are delighted to continue this with the new ARC Video Subsystems," said Craig Franklin, senior vice president of advanced products at Green Hills. "MULTI debugger and Integrated Development Environment drive the Metaware compiler. And, the Green Hills Probe, which is our JTAG connection device, ensures the software developer can access the hidden registers while debugging embedded software running on complex system-on-chip designs."