POWERVR Graphics, Video and Display IP Cores

Imagination Technologies' POWERVR™ visual IP technologies have been developed over the past 12 years to meet the most demanding requirements of high volume mobile and consumer applications. With their roots in arcade and digital TV, POWERVR visual technologies lead the world in delivering exceptional levels of performance while delivering low power, small silicon area and high levels of system latency tolerance when integrating with unified memory and other shared resources.

POWERVR Graphics

POWERVR graphics technology is based on a concept called Tile Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR). In contrast to Immediate Mode Rendering (IMR) used by most graphics engines in the PC and games console worlds, TBDR focuses on minimising the processing required to render an image as early in the processing of a scene as possible, so that only the pixels that actually will be seen by the end user consume processing resources. This approach minimises memory and power while improving processing throughput but it is more complex. Imagination Technologies has refined this challenging technology to the point where it dominates the mobile markets for 3D graphics rendering, backed up by an extensive patent portfolio.

Having optimised the core architecture for the mobile environment, the POWERVR MBX fourth-generation TBDR engines deliver exceptional performance in a mobile or embedded environment which is why they have been selected by industry leaders such as TI, Intel, Freescale, Renesas, Samsung and NXP to power their application processors' graphics functions. Indeed, as of March 2009 140m devices in more than 100 products are already shipping with POWERVR MBX technology inside.

Where POWERVR MBX delivers fully compliant OpenGL ES 1.1 capabilities as well as OpenVG 1.0 vector graphics and extensive 2D capabilities, the fifth generation POWERVR SGX Series5 architecture takes the TBDR capability to a new level. With a level of scalability from 1 to 8 pipelines and beyond, based on the unique Universal Scalable Shader Engine (USSE), POWERVR SGX brings fully compliant OpenGL ES 2.0 shader-based graphics capability to mobile and consumer platforms. However, backwards compatibility also ensures that any applications developed for POWERVR MBX not only execute, but do so with better performance and efficiency than ever before.

The POWERVR SGX Series5XT architecture builds on the success of Series5, delivering significant performance advantages through increased floating point and instruction throughput as well as natively supported YUV and color space conversion. This architecture further extends the scalability of the architecture by enabling multi-processor implementations with up to 16 instantiations enabling near-linear performance scaling of both geometry and pixel processing resources.

The POWERVR VGX architecture delivers native OpenVG 1.1 and OpenWF 1.0 compliant acceleration maintaining all the benefits of TBDR leading to market-leading vector graphics performance and quality with minimal CPU loading.

POWERVR Video

POWERVR video technology builds on the underlying architectural philosophies of POWERVR graphics: use the lowest power and memory by only processing what is absolutely necessary. This engineering philosophy has resulted in the POWERVR VXD decoder and VXE encoder families of video codecs. The third-generation VXD370, for example, uses a series of reconfigurable hardware engines controlled by our own META MTX embedded processing core to deliver a multi-standard video decoder capable of decoding dual HD streams in less than 50mW in a 65nm technology. This exceptional capability means that HD content can now be decoded and viewed on a mobile phone, or played from the phone directly on to a HD panel – and you'll be able to watch the entire film, not just the first 30 minutes! Our POWERVR VXE250 second-generation mutli-standard video encoder decodes all the main standards in SD resolution. When combined with the VXD370, mobile platforms can manage HD content as easily and with comparable power consumption to audio players today.

POWERVR Display

Imagination Technologies' long association with the TV industry has enabled us to develop an unrivalled range of display enhancement technologies for HDTV. From skin tone and blue/black stretch engines to state-of-the-art interlace-to-progressive scan conversion technologies; from frame rate conversion to TV output capabilities – POWERVR display technologies have it covered.