January 3, 2008 -- QuickLogic Corp., together with development partner Chrontel, is enabling handheld device developers to add simultaneous video output to their products without sacrificing battery lifetime or burdening the host application processor. The QuickLogic/ Chrontel solution has already been adopted by a leading smart phone manufacturer and can be customized to fit a wide range of design needs required by other adopters.

"This is one more of the many examples of QuickLogic’s low-power CSSP solutions providing fast time-to-market and design flexibility for handheld applications,"” said Jing Ma, Director of Partnerships and Strategic Alliances at QuickLogic. "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."

Working in conjunction with Chrontel, QuickLogic addressed three major challenges associated with the simultaneous display of images on both LCD screens and external video devices such as televisions and VGA projectors which 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 both 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 leverages 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 needed to address these challenges, all in a single device. When coupled with Chrontel’s CH7013 TV encoder and a mobile SDRAM frame buffer, the total design handles all rate conversions and voltage level shifting needed to get input data from the LCD display controller on the application processor and drive the TV encoder device.

"By partnering with QuickLogic," said David Tsai, Chrontel’s Director of Marketing, "we have successfully developed an approach that enables portrait-oriented images and video from mobile handsets, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and portable media players (PMPs) to display correctly on conventional NTSC and PAL displays. QuickLogic’s CSSP handles all the timing related to the various display rates and scan direction conversion while the CH7013 processes and tunes the video stream to produce excellent TV-out quality."

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