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Design starts in the mobile market are holding up despite concerns about falling confidence in the consumer market, according to the head of Irish chip start-up Movidia.
“In the market overall units are clearly down, but we are seeing the number of new design starts holding up,” Sean Mitchell, CEO Movidia told ElectronicsWeekly.com
In one way the economic climate has intensified pressure to get new products out. “OEMs are still looking for new product innovation and differentiation,” said Mitchell.
Although he did warn that cost pressures may be having an effect of the numbers of engineers in some OEMs.
Dublin-based Movidia is particularly aware of the number of design starts in the mobile phone market as it announces a multimedia processor, which is designed to enable PC-style video post-production in real time on the handset.
According to Mitchell, the fabless chip firm has working silicon of the MA1110 processor which is the three-year old firm’s first product.
“We have 65nm silicon in our hands and we will be sampling to customers in the summer,” said Mitchell.
Movidia will be demonstrating the MA1110 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, in February, but the company is already talking to handset firms in Europe and Asia.
According to Mitchell, the processor will tap in to the need for both mobile social networking and user generated content functionality on mobile phones.
“It can support complex video post-production features previously only achievable on a desktop computer. Users can capture, edit, view and publish their videos using only their phone,” said Mitchell.
Details of the chip which acts as a video co-processor, are limited but it seems to use parallel processing to maintain the lower power requirements of the mobile phone.
At the heart of the chip is a 32-bit Risc core, and the company has developed a proprietary internal bus structure to support the high level of data throughput.
The MA1110 also supports high resolutions of all standard audio and video codecs and APIs to ensure full compatibility with a wide range of content.
In October 2008, Movidia announced that it had secured $14m of Series A funding. R&D and sales teams are located in Dublin, Hong Kong and Romania.