CIE Components in Electronics
ARM has announced that Entropic, a specialist in semiconductor solutions for the connected home, has licensed the ARM Mali-400 and Mali-450 Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) technology and has also entered into a new license agreement for the Cortex-R5 processor. The strengthened partnership will enable Entropic to provide more advanced media and connectivity processing to its customers across the connected home ecosystem.
Entropic offers a mixed portfolio of STB system-on-a-chip (SoC) and MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance)-based connectivity solutions that will use the combination of ARM MPCore Cortex processors and graphics processing technology as the basis for the fundamental platform. The company processes multimedia digital content into and throughout the home to support the transition from traditional broadcast to IP streaming video delivery.
The strengthened ARM and Entropic alliance comes at a time when global Pay-TV service providers are accelerating their evolution toward IP video gateway/client architectures in the home, which require faster, more robust media processing solutions. By expanding the agreement for the Cortex series, Entropic is looking to provide customers with advanced, integrated multicore SoC plus MoCA platforms that will be able to deliver higher performance, lower power and greater scalability.
To complement the ARM Cortex processors, Entropic is investing in the Mali GPUs, which maintain the core ARM principles, namely high performance, industry-leading power efficiency and improved system cost. ARM’s Mali-400 and Mali-450 GPUs take performance density to new levels and are designed to minimize power and bandwidth requirements. The Mali-450 GPU has been optimized with a special focus on energy and bandwidth savings.
“Our strengthened partnership with ARM is an important step to advancing the evolution of the connected home,” said Vahid Manian, senior vice president, Global Operations, Entropic. “The ARM multi-core architecture coupled with its high-speed graphics engine enables Entropic to deliver richer, faster media experiences in its next-generation platform silicon solutions.”
“ARM is delighted to see its relationship with Entropic broadening to bring the benefits of combined Mali GPU and ARM Cortex processing into the connected home,” said Pete Hutton, executive vice president and general manager, Media Processing Division, ARM. “Delivery of a powerful, energy-efficient heterogeneous platform provides Entropic’s customers with many opportunities to deliver differentiated services and to shape the future of home-based consumer electronics.”
