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Blazing Handhelds - An Interview With Emblaze Semi's CEO
By Mark Long -- e-inSITE, 2/19/2003
For the past two years, Emblaze Semiconductor has been at the forefront of the multimedia revolution for streaming live video to wireless PDAs and smartphones.
The company launched the world's first live demo of video streaming to a wireless handset from Samsung at a CTIA Wireless exhibition in Las Vegas held in March of 2001 (See photo above). Since then, the company has conducted field trials with wireless operators around the world, as well as entered into agreements with several chip manufacturers to have the company's multimedia streaming technology ported to new processors and chipsets. Last year, the company demonstrated its MPEG-4 streaming technology running on Intel's PXA250 applications processor without requiring the addition of ASIC-based decoding or encoding chips.
Last Friday, e-inSITE caught up with Emblaze Semiconductor CEO Alon Ironi just before he was scheduled to depart for the 3GSM Congress in Cannes, France. In the following interview, Mr. Ironi evaluates this years' prospects for the company's multimedia streaming technology.
e-inSITE: Considering the present state of the economy worldwide in general and the specific financial problems that mobile carriers currently face, what are the prospects for multimedia technologies taking off in the mobile environment this year?
Alon Ironi: Carriers know that they must attract new subscribers because their penetration rates are reaching saturation for the currently available technologies. They have to offer compelling new applications to keep fueling market growth. While there is a reluctance to invest right now due to world economic conditions there is also a growing recognition that replacement phones are the key to keeping the industry in forward motion. It turns out that multimedia is driving the replacement phone market and many handset manufacturers are turning to color screens and cameras. The competition is intense and many are looking to compete by offering products that are distinct from those of their competitors or by initiating exclusive technology agreements.
e-inSITE: ...which gives your company an opportunity to blaze new trails. What are you doing at this year's 3GSM Congress to highlight your multimedia technology offerings?
Alon Ironi: We will be showcasing a new joint reference design with Philips Semiconductor that integrates our 4521 multimedia chip with the Philips FIFO baseband chip, enabling a complete reference design with software for a video-enabled GSM/GPRS cell phone that gives smaller companies the ability to design unqiue products with multimedia capabilities.
In a similar vein we have partnered with Israel-based Modemart in a 3G offering that will combine our 4521 chip with their 3G baseband chip. We will also be showcasing a complete evaluation board for the 4521 chip with peripherals and operating, showing movie trailers. And we have developed a new wireless LAN camera product that will enable users to position the camera anywhere in the home and then access full motion video over the Internet from any location. The reference design for this new product is expected to be released in June of this year.
e-inSITE: Given the popularity of camera-enabled cell-phones in Japan I am surprised that you don't already have a home for your technology in the Japanese marketplace. Why is that?
Alon Ironi: There are various issues that one faces when attempting to penetrate the Japanese market. Local phone manufacturers currently dominate the market and the companies there like to work with local vendors. Still we see the potential opportunities and are presently engaged in discussions with two large firms there, but we are not yet ready to make any announcements.
e-inSITE: STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments have both recently announced new chipsets for mobile applications based on the OMAPI standard that the two companies announced last December. How do you evaluate the technology's prospects?
Alon Ironi: Back in the 1999-200 time frame, it was then a test market for introducing multimedia in cellular applications. Back then we had to interface our chips to baseband and needed some way to allow our multimedia processor to talk with the main processor in the phone. On the bright side we were then mostly working in Korea where 95 percent of the market had standardized on chipsets from Qualcomm. But now that we are entering European markets the need for such standardization has become more evident.
We really see a need for standardization of the peripherals. We welcome it and certainly would consider adopting it if more handset manufacturers eventually move in that direction. OMAPI could eventually accelerate the evolution of multimedia handsets, allowing designs to be implemented more cheaply and quickly. But so far its Nokia who has announced its support of the OMAPI standard and that's not surprising since TI is their main silicon platform supplier.
e-inSITE: Given that new multimedia products have to squeeze in an increasing number of advanced capabilities, how does your company's products counteract the battery-depleting demands for more power? .
Alon Ironi: With the introduction of our new 4525 multimedia application processor later this year (See 'Emblaze Semi Samples Multimedia Co-Processor For Handhelds') we will be moving from a 0.18-micron to a 0.13-micron process. This is a straightforward move that will not only allow us to put more functions on the chip, particularly hardware accelerators to replace more power hungry software coding, but also decrease the power requirements. With the 4525 release, the CIF encoding and some decoding will be done by hardware accelerators. As a result the chip will be able to operate in full encode/decode mode while only consuming 70 mW of power.
As for chip size, we are not yet prepared to say because we have not yet settled on the right package, one that will have all the pins we need to fulfill the needs of the chip's many functions. Right now our 4521 is available in a 11x11mm package.
The 4525 represents a x4 improvement in performance, offering a 1.3 Mpixel camera capabilities for integration in handhelds and supporting larger screens with 352x288 pixels for streaming full motion video at 30 fps. This is where the technology really gets exciting because you really get a good quality camera in a cell phone then.
e-inSITE: What plans does your company have for launching multimedia smart phone products in the Korean marketplace?
Alon Ironi: In Korea, JTEL currently has the largest market share, about 60 percent. We are helping them build a multimedia PDA based on the 4521 chip. With regards to SKT, we are working with Samsung to implement new technology, protocols, bit rates, to allow 30 frames per second fps QCIF resolutions for streaming video. We also benefit from our on-going experience in the Korean market because it helps us to optimize our products.
The Koreans are really receptive to multimedia technology, they have high speed internet service at home and the wireless infrastructure to support streaming multimedia over handsets. Our earliest offering with Samsung proved to have too high a price point for the market and so only a few thousand handsets were sold. But now we are moving forward in our support of new models from Samsung that will be offered in that market later this year.
We have also designed a new model for Europe that will be available in Italy later this month that is from Samsung, the SDGH-100, which is based on our 4520 chip. In Korea Samsung will have a new model out in 3Q03 with 32 MB of flash that will allow end-users to capture and store still images and video clips for sending over 1XEVDO networks.
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Emblaze Semiconductor's technology is currently available both as on-chip resources as well as licensable IP. Emblaze Semiconductor is headquartered in Ra'anana, Israel with an additional development branch at the MATAM R&D park in Haifa. The company also maintains sales and marketing offices in Korea, China, UK, US, and Singapore.
