Renesas announces HEVC/H.265 video codec hardware IP licensing

Renesas Electronics to Commence Sale of HEVC/H.265 Video Codec Hardware IP as Part of Expansion of Licensing Business

TOKYO — Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723) today announced the development of video codec intellectual property (IP) technology supporting the latest video encoding standard, HEVC/H.265, which is expected to be adopted in a wide range of markets, including mobile devices, consumer devices, vehicle information systems, and industrial equipment. As its second offering in the licensing business, sales of the new IP will start in November of this year, and plans call for its implementation in the third generation (currently under development) of the Renesas R-Car series of system on a chip (SoC) products for vehicle information systems.

Renesas supports the varied requirements of customers developing new systems and provides enhanced development efficiency with microcontrollers boasting the No. 1 market share worldwide as well as analog and power devices. Renesas has been moving away from a business model in which products in the above categories are supplied separately to a model based on kit solutions, in which individual semiconductor products are bundled with software, and on platform solutions and an associated ecosystem comprising varied IP technology that enables customers to provide added value to their own products; semiconductor foundations such as process technology; and bundled software such as OSes and middleware.

Renesas considers platform solutions to be a key component in realizing the “smart society” of the future and has been working to build an ecosystem comprising semiconductor foundations, software, and collaboration with partner companies. Moving forward, Renesas believes it is essential to bring competitive IP technologies to market as soon as possible so that they can become established as industry standards. With this in mind, Renesas is working to enrich its IP portfolio while at the same time expanding the licensing business through which it supplies IP technology to the market.

In recent years, digital video devices combining high performance and Internet connectivity have achieved widespread adoption, and this has caused an explosive increase in the amount of video data transferred over broadband infrastructure. At the same time, there is increasing demand for peer-to-peer video transfer employing data compression and decompression for transferring video and sharing screens between devices. Also, the popularity of high-resolution content for ultra-high-definition television (UHDTV) products with 4K2K displays, etc., is starting to impose a severe strain on the bandwidth of broadband networks as well as home and vehicle networks. This has made high-compression encoding superior to that of existing technologies essential for implementing video transfer applications moving forward.

In response to this need, Renesas has developed and commercialized hardware IP that implements 4K2K video processing with support for the new HEVC/H.265 high-efficiency encoding standard recommended by ITU-T in April 2013.