Renesas demonstrates S60 3rd edition software running on SH-mobile processor

Renesas Technology Corp. has announced a cooperation agreement with Nokia, bringing the benefits of S60 on Symbian OS to Renesas’ SH-Mobile application processor supporting S60 3rd Edition software. An upgrade, the move is designed to provide advanced multimedia features for high-end smartphones.

Aimed at mobile phone manufacturers, the Renesas processor running S60 addresses the need to reduce design time and cost of a complicated multimedia software framework in a mobile phone application. The processor meets growing performance requirements for multimedia acceleration such as audio, video and graphics. It also meets the need to reduce power consumption.

S60 3rd Edition software focuses on enhanced multimedia and enterprise functionality, sustainable application business support, customization enablers and improved platform architecture. S60 3rd Edition also includes the features and functions of the previous editions, including multiradio, extensive application suite, scalable UI and high-resolution support.

Renesas has used its own IP for hardware video acceleration and software multimedia codecs. The company’s SH4AL-DSP core is used for multimedia DSP functionality and was developed by the company. Additionally many of the multimedia HW accelerators and SW codecs were developed by Renesas. The SH-Mobile application processor provides a high performance multimedia solution for smartphones enabling a short time to market with a low R&D investment.

Ikuya Kawasaki, deputy general manager of system solution business unit 2 at Renesas Technology, said, “The S60 3rd Edition software will enable handset manufacturers to reduce their time-to-market for new smartphones. With Renesas expertise and leadership in wireless multimedia, we are developing SH-Mobile to be the market-leading single chip platform for 3G smartphones. We are very pleased to be able to integrate these two excellent platforms together to provide a complete smartphone solution for the benefit of our customers.�

Matti Vänskä, vice president, mobile software sales and marketing, Nokia, stated, “Collaboration with leading industry players will benefit licensees with advanced functionalities and high performance when developing smartphones based on S60 software. We are pleased to welcome Renesas to the S60 Product Creation Community.�

Renesas’ SH-Mobile is a flexible application accelerator that provides multimedia support for next-generation cellular phone communications. Unlike a traditional baseband CPU method that uses a single CPU to manage both signal and application processing, the SH-Mobile design approach uses a dual CPU architecture that dedicates one CPU to application execution in order to maximise communication performance. Built on Renesas’ SuperH 32-bit RISC superscalar architecture, SH-Mobile devices offers compelling functionality such as the JPEG, MP3, acoustic echo canceller, AMR codec, MPEG4 encode/decode and Java Virtual Machine capabilities that are essential for supporting the high-end multimedia applications of next generation mobile phones.

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