Vivace And IGRS Engineering Lab To Develop IGRS-Compliant Multimedia Chips, Vivace Joins IGRS Home Networking Standards Effort

Collaboration on IGRS support in high-performance, low power devices for IGRS SmartTV, set-top boxes and handheld media players

BEIJING, China — Vivace Semiconductor, a leader in digital media processing chips, today announced it has signed an agreement with the IGRS Engineering Lab, Ltd. to jointly develop reference designs based on Vivace’s chips that can be used to develop products that are compliant with the new home networking standard. In addition, Vivace announced it has joined the IGRS (Intelligent Grouping and Resource Sharing) work group and standardization effort. The innovative start-up intends to develop the first media processing chips from a local Chinese supplier that offer support of the emerging protocol. Vivace, as a promoting member of IGRS, joins close to 80 other electronics companies participating in the China-specific effort to develop a standard way for various devices (such as TVs, projectors, PMPs, mobile phones, printers and digital media adapters) to communicate and share resources over a common networking protocol.

Under the agreement, Vivace will work with IGRS Engineering Lab, Ltd. to jointly develop a reference design with Vivace’s media processing chips, targeting digital TV and set-top box applications. The reference design will be based on the company’s VSP200 and VSP300 media processors, which combine high-performance capabilities with robust support of multiple media compression and data IO interface standards, low-power operation, and a configurable / field-upgradeable platform. One key enabling feature of the Vivace chips, in addition to implementing the IGRS media-sharing protocol, is the ability to support seamless data connections for consistent high-quality video quality between a DTV media center and any home or portable devices. This enables low-power and low-cost portable video players to perform on-the-fly decoding and display video content in multiple media standards, and at up to 720p (HD-ready) and 1080p (HDTV) quality. Additionally, the VSP200 and VSP300 chips offer a highly-integrated SoC architecture that will simplify system assembly and reduce component counts. The system solution will offer manufacturers significantly lowered BOM, as well less difficulty and cost in PCB implementation due to its processors’ much lower clock rate. Vivace will supply early samples, software, development systems and support to IGRS and its member companies to accelerate the development of IGRS-compliant products.

“It is important that we work with semiconductor suppliers such as Vivace to implement the IGRS standard in working silicon and demonstrate its utility in multi-device environments,” Dr. Sun Yuning, President of the IGRS Information Technology Engineering Center. “Vivace has demonstrated unique technical advantages with its processor architecture, and their ability to support a variety of standards quickly and efficiently make them an ideal candidate to develop IGRS compliant solutions. We are looking forward to working with them and the other IGRS participants to develop systems that take advantage of the potential of IGRS.”

Engineers from Vivace and IGRS Engineering Lab will work together to extend the capabilities of its core technology to support IGRS standard features into its VSP200 and VSP300 processor designs. The companies have formed a Joint Technological Committee, which will reside in Vivace’s Beijing-based Partner Application Engineering Zone. The committee will address the roles of future key chip technologies to enable enhanced features under the IGRS protocol. In addition to their initial work on developing IGRS SmartTV solutions, the joint team will work on an IGRS-recommended media subsystem SoC and solution for satellite device developers and manufacturers. Support will include DRM, data codec and command link standards to the portfolio of support already part of the high-end parts in the Vivace series.

“Vivace’s strategy is focused on the convergence of digital applications in consumer electronics and that is completely aligned with the IGRS vision,” said Cary Ussery, president and CEO of Vivace. “We are committed to developing and supporting technology and standards that enable convergence, both in China specifically and throughout the world. We are pleased to be actively participating in the IGRS specification and roadmap process, and look forward to implementing the capabilities in our products.”