Mobilic Introduces New Portable Multimedia Development Kit; Combines Features of Digital Camera, PMP, Games and Internet with Production Ready Development Kit

WebKnowHow
Wednesday, July 5, 2006; 02:24 AM

Mobilic Technology Corporation, designer of SoC solutions for mobile products, announced its new, portable multimedia device solution that combines the features of a digital camera, a personal media player (PMP), Java games, Web browsing and a production-ready development kit. The development kit, called MDK730, is for applications such as cell phones, portable multimedia players, IP cameras and other portable consumer products.

The MDK730 is based on Mobilic's MP730 multimedia processor that was introduced in December 2005. The MDK730 includes a complete set of reference design board schematics, a Gerber file, standard reference software and a software development kit. The reference design board (12cm x 8.5cm) includes a multimedia board, numeric keypad, 2.2" 320x240 TFT LCD display and 1.3 mega-pixel image sensor.

The MP730 multimedia processor provides the highest level of functional integration in the industry, supporting more applications than any other known IC on the market. The MP730, integrates the 200 MHz ARM926EJ CPU, a scaleable image signal processor (supporting sensors up to 12 mega-pixels), a MPEG4 codec, a USB Host and Device, 10/100 MHz Ethernet, SDIO and many other interfaces. The high functional integration of the processor assures lower development costs, more elegant designs and a smaller application footprint.

In addition, the MP730 now also runs on the Linux operating System (OS), which was ported by Mobilic engineers. The addition of the royalty-free Linux OS allows vendors to add to their products some of the most popular features available, such as optical character recognition (OCR), face recognition and voice to text.

"Think about combining image capture, OCR and text-to-voice, to your product, no matter if it's a cell phone or a portable media player (PMP)," said Eric Chan, Mobilic's engineering vice president. "With the addition of the Linux OS, the MDK730 provides the most cost effective and flexible solution for users to easily add some of the most popular applications to their product." Other possible value add-ons include integrated networking capability Web browsing, voice-over-IP and network media streaming.

Joseph Jiang, president and CEO of Mobilic said, "I am really proud of our team. It has been only 18 months from the design kick-off of this complex multimedia processor till now and we are already shipping it to our customers." Jiang added that Mobilic would continue to add to the development kit. Three major platform features targeted for inclusion are WiFi connection, GPS and mobile digital TV.

The complete MDK730 kit is priced at $990. For customers who want to build an end product, the estimated total bill-of-materials cost is under US$70, according to Mobilic.