SUNNYVALE, Calif., 27 Dec. 2007. QuickLogic Corp. in Sunnyvale, Calif., announced it can enable handheld device developers to add simultaneous video output to their products without sacrificing battery lifetime or burdening the host application processor.
QuickLogic is making the announcement together with development partner Chrontel Inc. in San Jose, Calif. The QuickLogic/Chrontel solution has been adopted by a smart phone manufacturer, QuickLogic officials say.
"This new simultaneous display solution enables developers to implement a wide range of exciting handheld capabilities, such as plugging a PDA into a conference room television to give a presentation, playing a mobile-phone video game on a TV, or even watching a movie stored on a portable media player on any TV," says Jing Ma, director of partnerships and strategic alliances at QuickLogic.
Working with Chrontel, QuickLogic addressed three challenges associated with the simultaneous display of images on LCD screens and external video devices such as televisions and VGA projectors that have different scan directions.
The first challenge was providing the memory control to manage frame buffers using an X-Y pixel swap that provides correct simultaneous image display on the portrait-mounted LCD panels common to handheld devices and the landscape-oriented displays of television and video projectors.
The second challenge was to accommodate frame- and pixel-rate differences between LCD and various television standards, including NTSC and PAL.
The third was to provide this functionality without making excessive demands on system battery power and without requiring host processor intervention beyond setup and configuration.
QuickLogic's CSSP solution uses the company's ultra-low-power programmable fabric technology to implement the memory interfaces, RGB interfaces, X-Y Swap conversion logic, and active power management in one device. When coupled with Chrontel's CH7013 TV Encoder and a mobile SDRAM frame buffer, the design handles rate conversions and voltage level shifting to get input data from the LCD display controller on the application processor and drive the TV encoder device.
For more information contact QuickLogic online at www.quicklogic.com.
