On2 Technologies Announces New HD Hardware Encoder IP

Following the Hantro 6280, which was licensed by more than 15 leading chip manufacturers, the encoder brings further speed improvements to achieve resolutions up to 1280x1024 at 30 fps. Easily encoding full 720p H.264 at 30 fps in only 180 MHz clock frequency, the 7280 brings ultra-high performance to 65 nm and 90 nm low-power chipsets. Placing a CPU load of less than 1MHz, the Hantro 7280 allows even an entry level ARM9-based chipset to encode real-time HD H.264 video with plenty of headroom to spare. The new encoder also incorporates proprietary image stabilization technology which reduces the effects of camera shake prior to encoding resulting in higher quality video with better compression.

Optimized for rapid integration with ARM, MIPS and other embedded CPU and DSP cores, the Hantro 7280 marries high performance with ultra low-power and efficient silicon utilization. Silicon area can be further optimized for unique applications by selecting only the formats and screen resolutions required with area reduced to as small as 0.19 square millimeters per 139,000 gates. Additional area savings can be gained in a full codec solution by sharing internal memories with the Hantro 8190 multi-format decoder.

"For portable devices, battery-life is a critical success factor and manufacturers seek to optimize in every aspect." says Eero Kaikkonen, Chief Marketing Officer at On2.  "The 7280 requires only 12 mW to encode VGA H.264 in real-time. Although in practice it is not possible, theoretically an ARM 11 would require as much as 500mW to achieve the same performance."

The Hantro 7280 is available now for licensing from On2. The product comes complete with RTL source code for VHDL or Verilog, an RTL test bench and test data, ANSI C driver source code and complete technical documentation.