Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Full HD 1080p Video Processor for Cell Phones

full HD 1080p video processor for cell phones mobile phonesRenesas is set to announce a Full HD 1080p Video Processor for cell phones. It will announce video processor that enables mobile phones to process 1920 x 1080 (1080p) resolution 30fps full HDTV video at ISSCC 2009, which will take place in San Francisco, California, from Feb 8 to 12, 2009. Renesas had announced in May 2008 that it was developing a full HDTV video processor.

The 6.4 x 6.5mm chip was manufactured using 65nm CMOS technology. Its power consumption is 342mW when it is processing full HDTV video in real time via 166MHz 64-bit DDR-SDRAM.

Some overseas semiconductor manufacturers have already started sample shipments of their HDTV-compatible application processors. Broadcom Corp announced its HDTV-compatible processor in October 2007, while Nvidia Corp and Texas Instruments Inc announced theirs in February 2008. All these processors can encode and decode 1280 x 720 resolution 30fps HDTV video but are not compliant with full HD video.

But this definitely begs the question if the phone screens are sufficient for us to actually appreciate a 1080p full HD movie. I already have trouble watching movies on my iPhone for anything more than 20 minutes. Even though this is certainly a technology breakthrough, it still looks like one of those "nice to have" features rather than a good value proposition to drive customers to purchase cell phones with HD capability.

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