As if to emphasize the low-power consumption of its H.264 video encoder design, Jointwave prints its technology overview on green paper. In October, the Silicon Valley- and Beijing-based startup presented its video processing and codec technology to makers of semiconductors, broadcast and industrial equipment and mobile devices at the annual conference of the Hua Yuan Science and Technology Association.
Jointwave targets two distinct markets. The first is low-bit-rate and high-video-quality applications such as mobile and wireless video transmission. The second is high- to ultra-high-bit-rate (100Mb/s to 1.5Gb/s) applications including broadcast video editing system, digital cinema, professional broadcast encoding and optical video transition compressed storage. The company expects its H.264 encoder core to start showing up in consumer devices next year and is currently in discussions with some "major" video chipmakers, according to Jointwave CEO Paul Qiu.
The H.264 encoder IP core offers:
• Real-time encoding;
• Broadcast-quality video;
• Single-chip HD;
• Baseline, Main Profile, High Profile and High 4:4:4 Profile;
• Support for L3.1 to L5.1 and up to 4096 x 2048 resolution;
• Register transfer level implementation to eliminate software and OS crashes;
• Fully configurable through registers;
• Wide temperature tolerance from -40 degrees to 125 degrees Celsius; and
• Power consumption of 60mW for 1080p on 65nm processor.
Jointwave's encoder technology can be used without an embedded or external CPU, reducing system complexity, and runs on FPGA and ASIC. The company has partnerships with Xilinx and Altera and includes Intel among its
customers. Development kits are available now on Altera's Cyclone III and Stratix III and will soon be offered on Xilinx's Spartan-3, Virtex-6 and Spartan-6.
