We were pretty excited with the formation of the new Mobile High-Definition Interface Working Group, which happened in September, and so we thought a chat with the core IP owners behind the standard, US company Silicon Image, might prove enlightening.
We spokes this week to Tim Vehling, VP of world wide marketing for Silicon Image, and asked if perhaps we went overboard in our September coverage, where we likened the new way of connecting phones to TV sets to re-inventing HDMI or USB technology.
‘There is huge potential in an HDMI format for mobile output of HD video,’ said Vehling, and later went on to quantify that market size, pointing out that there will be 300 million Smart phones in 2010, plus 150 million HDTV devices delivered per annum, and an existing installed base of HDMI TV sets of 500 million. All of these are targets for the chips that Silicon Image and others will be selling shortly.
Vehling made it clear that the standard did not specify connectors, but that an existing HDMI input to the TV and a microUSB output from the phone would perhaps be the most likely connector types which many suppliers would choose, powered by the new 5 pin format that the standard has specified. Existing HDMI devices would be able to support some form of powered dongle which would create a connection to the mobile phone.
The critical stage here is the provision of electrical power, something that USB ports give, and that has proved to be the most successful connector types in the history of technology, with billions shipped. It means that when you use TV out from your handset to a HD screen, the device (which has plenty of processing power to drive HD content) is being re-charged, rather than drained of battery.
‘Our chips will detect legacy HDMI or a Mobile HD Interface and provide the right outputs for either,’ said Vehling, ‘because as you know, HDMI does not support the delivery of power.’
‘But we knew that trying to make this market happen with our existing proprietary Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) technology, would never work. Getting a consortium established (which includes Nokia, Sony, Samsung and Toshiba ‘ 3 out of the top five handset makers and 3 out of the top four TV makers) was our primary goal. And while we will get some royalty revenue out of this, we really are about delivering chips ourselves, and we will be competing with many larger companies to take a share of this market. There is pent up demand in the handset market for a technology for this type,’ he added.
Silicon Image has 85% of its revenues in chip shipments, and a little in royalties despite having a hand in the delivery of both the HDMI and SPMT (Serial Port Memory Technology) standards and achieves 55% gross margins, which much of the rest funding a high R&D burden. ‘We remain active in HDMI and HDMI 1.4 has just been published in June which will support an Ethernet data channel as well, and 4K x 2K resolutions.’
Ethernet is important because there are so many ways of bringing data to the TV set from multiple devices and they all want to connect to the internet.
These are the next steps after 1080p and include 3840×2160 and 4096×2160 formats, at the same level for the TV as digital cinemas. The result of that is the surge in 3D cinema, which will now also be able to shift to TV once these resolutions begin to emerge.
‘3D has been specified in HDMI and is delivered through a dual-stream 1080p, which means HDMI has to deliver more than double the data rate uncompressed. Some companies in the Far East are already talking about offering this,’ said Vehling, ‘and we suspect that Blu-ray will announce support for 2K and 4K at CES. Providing 3D is the best way for TV manufacturers to upsell high end TVs.’
But how does a company of Silicon Image’s size (on track for $200 million in 2009 despite being at $274 million in 2008) continue to punch above its weight, once standards are set. ‘ One way we can keep up with larger rivals is by continuing to innovate. Take our InstaPort technology. It takes about 5 seconds to switch from the various sources and devices connected by HDMI. It has to detect and identify the device, detect the right video format, handle an HDCP authorization dialog and begin rendering. It’s an unacceptable delay when you want to switch between say a blu-ray player and a DVR.
InstaPort gets that delay down to about 1 second simply by deciding to go ahead with a HDCP authentication as soon as the device is detected, not waiting for when it is called upon to deliver video. And that is now built into all of the Silicon Image HDMI chips.
We then chatted to Ron Richter Director of Marketing, Intellectual Property Products, who was supposed to be filling us in on another recent Silicon Image announcement, the CameraIC-18, which we also wrote about a few weeks back, an IP Core for sale to handset chip makers to offer 18 Megapixel image processing on future SoC handset chips. This is a completely different business model where the company will not offer any silicon of its own, but supports existing Silicon efforts, a little like Arm does on low power mobile application processing.
Obviously this picks up on the trend for most applications to run on the same piece of silicon as the baseband to create handset SoCs, a process favoured by Qualcomm in particular. The camera is becoming ubiquitous and is on over 90% of handsets, and IP cores which specialize in bringing down the image processing load to the fewest possible number of logic gates, have the potential of getting onto 900 million phones each year.
Ron was happy to talk through CameraIC-18, and impressed us with how it was designed to clean up images taken with the less reliable, but cheaper, CMOS components in mobile phones rather than the CCDs used in modern cameras. He cited techniques to detect and correct things like pixels which are stuck on or off, by building in comparison between past images, and by using advanced de-noising algorithms. But afterwards he too wanted to talk about the Mobile HD Interface.
‘We’ve only scratched the surface in terms of applications that will come out of Mobile HD,’ he said, ‘We have a control channel, so the phone’s resources can be controlled from the TV, and that means from the remote control. I can’t wait until equipment suppliers begin to innovate around this standard, it’s a game changer.’ We have to agree.