Wave Issue 0207 3/4/02 Article 4-02

***Amphion JPEG2000 Core with Hardware-Accelerated Wavelet
Transform Now Available
(February 28)

Amphion Semiconductor Ltd., a provider of semiconductor
intellectual-property for broadband, wireless and multimedia
communications, today announces availability of the first
entirely hardware-accelerated Wavelet Transform based JPEG2000
Encoder core for advanced still- and motion-image compression
applications, such as `dual-mode' still/movie-clip multi-
megapixel digital cameras, 3G/4G, medical imaging, office
equipment and surveillance. The Amphion CS6510 JPEG2000 hardware-
accelerator core interfaces with any embedded host processor to
construct a complete JPEG2000 encoding system on a single chip.

The Amphion CS6510 core is fully compliant with the ISO/IEC
15444-1 standard JPEG2000 image coding system and carries out
computationally-intensive tasks such as wavelet transform,
entropy coding, quantization, and data scheduling, leaving the
system processor to handle other tasks such as managing the user
interface and output data formatting. When implemented in 180nm
CMOS process technology the CS6510 delivers data encoding rates
up to 60 MegaSamples/second on 8-bit samples with real-time
'lossy' image compression ratios up to 50:1. The core also
handles arbitrary image sizes up to 2(31) x 2(31) pixels,
standard 'lossless' compression, flexible image input formats,
and a wide variety of grayscale and color imaging formats such as
RGB, YUV, YCrCb, and CMYK.

JPEG2000 in the 4G infrastructure

Large telecommunications providers are planning to integrate CMOS
image sensors into tens of millions of next-generation mobile
handsets to facilitate new services. Even though some anticipate
bandwidth in 4G wireless infrastructure to be higher than 100
Mbits/second, the imaging content from millions of users must be
managed in order to achieve acceptable quality of service.
Amphion believes compression by JPEG2000 could reduce bandwidth
loading and help recover from dropped packets in transmission.

Flexible architecture for SoC applications

Amphion can configure the performance and power consumption of
the reference CS6510 JPEG2000 core to cover a variety of
applications. For example, in battery-powered mobile handsets
where low power is generally more crucial than high-resolution
images, the core can trade some performance to decrease power
consumption down to 13 milliwatts. For applications such as
medical imaging, where real-time high-resolution images are
vital, the performance can be boosted to 480 Mbits/second.

Availability

The Amphion CS6510 JPEG2000 Encoder core will be available for
license from second quarter 2002 followed shortly by JPEG2000
decoder and codec solutions. The Amphion CS6210 Discrete Wavelet
Transform (DWT) core is available separately for SoC/ASIC
designers developing hybrid software-hardware JPEG2000 sub-
systems. Amphion has already licensed its existing portfolio of
silicon-proven JPEG cores for SoC/ASIC and FPGA/PLD to multiple
semiconductor and systems design customers.