Amphion, the IP Licensing business that NXP Semiconductors acquired with Conexant BMP, recently announced further success for one of its family of IP cores - the MPEG2 high definition (4:2:2) decoder. Ikegami Tsushinki Co., Ltd. Tokyo, a leading manufacturer of high definition broadcast television camera and production equipment has selected the Amphion core as part of their HDTV solution for the latest high definition broadcast and professional camera global market.

Amphion‘s solution has been selected due to the twin attributes of core size, and high throughput of the IP core on FPGA technology delivering low latency, a key requirement in any HDTV broadcast chain. The silicon proven Amphion MPEG2 decoder is a completely hardware based IP core. This is one of the smallest and lowest power consumption implementation of real time decode of high definition MPEG2 4:2:2 100Mbps streams on Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA technology.

In addition to the high performance of Amphion‘s MPEG2 solution, the IP core‘s stand alone operation releases the host CPU for other activities and simplifies the system level integration of the core.

Ikegami‘s solution requires the flexibility of an FPGA, together with real time decode of 4:2:2 MPEG2 streams. Decoding these HDTV broadcasts has previously necessitated dedicated high performance ASICs, and not IP cores on FPGA.

Amphion‘s MPEG2 4:2:2 decoder successfully meets both these performance and portability challenges. The recent release of new FPGAs such as the Xilinx Virtex 5, now delivers sufficient high performance to enable Amphion‘s MPEG2 decoder to decode high definition MPEG2 (4:2:2) HDTV streams in real time not only on ASIC but also now on FPGA, without host intervention.

This achievement of MPEG2 (4:2:2) real time decode on FPGA continues Amphion‘s ongoing success licensing high performance, portable IP encoder and decoder cores - variants of JPEG, MPEG2, H.264/MPEG4, VC1 and multiformat codes - for implementation on both ASIC and FPGA technologies.

This deal is supported by Spinnaker Systems Inc., Amphion‘s local distributor in Japan. For further details regarding any member of Amphion‘s proven portfolio of IP cores please contact Amphion here.