Sometimes you have to see a product up close and personal to see just what it’s about, and in the middle of a briefing with Texas Instruments, on the plus points of its DaVinci video architecture, initially aimed at set tops, we were caught short by a Thomson product that uses the chip that seems to set something of a new genre.
Sure we have heard of wi-fi tablets, but we had always seen them as things that Nokia devotees carry around an enterprise, and we have seen portable TV sets, which were more ‘luggable’ than portable. We have even seen multi-room TV that can be reliably delivered over wi-fi, but the Thomson device seems to be all of these in one.
It uses the DM6441, which is a DaVinci with an Arm core, a DSP and video co-processors all on a single chip. The device doubles as pretty much whatever you like, a photo frame, a music player, a portable screen for video conferencing, a video night light, whatever the wi-fi can handle, but mostly it is an 8 inch, 800 by 480 TV screen running H.264 video, and weighing almost nothing and running the G version of wi-fi. Although the device was first shown at CeBit in March, it has still to be delivered.
A device like this shows just how clever the Texas Instruments idea was to just offer a System on a Chip for driving video, which is what the DaVinci has become precisely two years after it was launched at the 2005 IBC show in Amsterdam.
Today the DaVinci chip range is in video phones, car entertainment systems, sits at the heart of video security equipment, cameras, the Archos range of portable video devices and has more than a showing among its originally intended target area of IPTV set tops.
Later this year Texas will throw away the digital signal processor which was initially at the heart of the device and alter the design in its new 355 version, to cope with 720p High Definition TV streams creating a chip that costs less than $10. The processing power will come from an Arm 9 core, an MPEG JPEG co-processor(MJCP), and the price will include all the codecs ‘ so no further royalty payments required.
It is this integrated MJCP, working with a new video processing sub-system (VPSS), which is replacing the DSP in the design, that is moving down the price of these TI chips and which will eventually enable video in cheaper and cheaper devices, with the bill of materials for these two cutting $2 off the price of the device. The battery life is also bolstered in this way and the DaVinci 355 will be driving 80 minutes of continuous HD video capture on the back of 2 AA batteries.
Texas Instruments has two important targets for the next few years for its handsets, in that it has promised that its OMAP 3 handset applications processor will be able to drive a HD screen, and that devices which use it will also be able to drive a low power DLP (Digital Light Processor) so that HD video images can be projected from a handset. It’s not too surprising that much the same results can be seen in the non-handset DaVinci range.
All that, combined with the development tools TI has brought up alongside the DaVinci means that we are going to see a lot more video capable devices ‘ the chip is under $10, has fast development times, low battery life ‘ that’s pretty irresistible.