Its High Definition (HD) QL303 and QL305 codecs, the latest members of its industry-leading, low-power, H.264 codec family hs been unveiled at Computex by a Silicon Valley, USA-based innovator in video compression silicon and software solutions, Qpixel Technology. By supporting Baseline, Main, and High profiles of the H.264 standard for resolutions ranging from QVGA (320x240) to full HD (1920x1080), the new chips provide the industry’s broadest H.264 feature-set. Confirming Qpixel’s leadership in innovative codec design and its commitment to Green Technology initiatives for lowering energy consumption in consumer electronic devices, by being the first to offer full HD H.264 encoding at less than 275 mW of power, Qpixel is also raising the power-performance bar.

Steming from Qpixel’s market proven multi-core architecture, the unique combination of flexibility and high performance provided by the QL300 family features, in addition to its powerful H.264 codec engine,  a JPEG compression/decompression engine for simultaneous still frame processing, an on-chip DSP for flexible audio processing, and an ARM core for audio/video synchronization, bit stream packetization, and peripheral interface management.

Including camcorders, digital cameras, and smart phones, the QL303’s set of flexible peripheral interfaces make the part suitable for a wide range of portable devices. Power sensitive smart phone devices, are enabled by the advanced power management and the modular design of the chip to capture and encode HD video for as low as 100mW of power (1280x720 at 15fps). Including in-home media distribution, consumer video chat, and remote monitoring, Digital home applications can also benefit from the versatility of the QL303. Allowing the chip to seamlessly connect to a variety of system controllers, thereby enabling an easy upgrade path for systems with less advanced or lower resolution compression engines, the QL303 offers, similar to its predecessor (QL201B), a flexible parallel interface.

Including mobile internet devices (MID), laptops, desktop PCs, and Webcams, the QL305 offers the same rich set of audio and video compression and image processing capabilities as the QL303; however, the inclusion of additional peripheral interfaces makes the chip ideal for personal communication and computing platforms. Bringing a richer user experience for sharing User Generated Content (UGC) and video chat applications, the combination of its advanced power management, compatibility with popular image sensors, and the small foot-print, allows the QL305 to be integrated onto standard sensor modules used in next generation consumer portable devices. The inclusion of popular high-speed serial interfaces allows, in addition, the chip to seamlessly integrate onto a PC motherboard and offer a multi-purpose video and audio hardware accelerator for enhanced media processing in high definition video communication and transcoding applications.