TriMedia

Over several years, telos has gained competence in developing and adapting applications for the TriMedia signal processor and its successor the Nexperia Media Processor manufactured by NXP (formerly Philips Semiconductors).

The TriMedia and the Nexperia are 32-bit dedicated media processors for high-performance multimedia applications that deal with high-quality video and audio. Since general-purpose CPU's are not designed for the ever more sophisticated demands of multimedia applications, they use add-ons such as individual DSPs or specialized chips to handle each form of data separately.

DSPs like the TriMedia/Nexperia have the power to handle simultaneous manipulation of advanced 3D graphics, and high-quality audio and video data. Using a highly-parallel VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) architecture, NXP has created dedicated media processors which can handle simultaneous processing of all data types and is programmable in common high-level languages such as C/C++. For example, a single TriMedia/Nexperia processor can handle video and audio streaming, video scaling, MPEG encode as well as decode, 3D graphics, and more in real-time. Although it has its own real-time operating system, in PC applications it can function as a dedicated coprocessor, offloading the multimedia processing workload from the CPU. Also, the TriMedia/Nexperia processor can handle the general tasks of a CPU over and above multimedia processing.

Because of its capabilities the TriMedia/Nexperia processor is an ideal platform for the new generation of multimedia devices such as digital set-top boxes, TV-sets and time-shift video recorders. Such applications require the real-time processing of multiple video and audio streams including tasks like (de)compression, scaling, (de)coding and conversion between different audio/video standards.

Many telos engineers are engaged in the software development for this class of devices over several years now. Our experience in software creation ranges from low-level components like device drivers or interrupt service routines up to the higher-level parts of a software stack, e.g. streaming modules for video and audio data which control the data flow through different video and audio processing chains.

telos engineers also gathered experience with the next generation of media processors derived from the TriMedia/Nexperia product line. For example the PNX8500 aka Viper combines a 32-bit MIPS CPU core for operating system and control tasks with a 32-bit TriMedia core for time-critical media processing operations. Additional hardware accelerators deliver high-level MPEG-2 video decoding and games quality graphics, while extensive connectivity capabilities include IEEE 1394 (Firewire) and USB interfaces.

A dedicated software architecture, the Nexperia Digital Video Platform (DVP), is available for multimedia systems based on the PNX8500. Many of our employees participated in the development of certain DVP software components and obtained detailled knowledge about its structure and internal functionality.

The Philips wordmark and shield emblem are trademarks of Philips Electronics, NV. TriMedia and the TriMedia logo are trademarks of TriMedia Technologies, Inc. Nexperia is a trademark of Philips Electronics N.V.