ASIA Japan : Renesas Technologyannounced that the company's SH-Mobile application processor for mobile phones has been incorporated into the new LG-U900 ( inset ) manufactured by LG Electronics. The LG-U900 is the world's first commercially available UMTS (W-CDMA) DVB-H capable handset.

Mobile DTV has the potential to become a killer application in the global marketplace with a number of services for digital TV (DTV) broadcasts on mobile phones being offered worldwide -- such as DVB-H in Europe, DMB(3) in South Korea, and ISDB-T (One-Segment broadcasting)(4) in Japan. The SH-Mobile application processor is already used in 10 commercially available handset models offering DTV reception capabilities. It is employed in the W33SA from Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd., and the W41H from Hitachi, Ltd., both ISDB-T-compatible models for the Japanese market. Several South Korean companies have chosen SH-Mobile for their S-DMB handset models, such as the LG-SB130 and LG-KB1300 from LG Electronics. Adoption of SH-Mobile is also growing among new T-DMB handset models, which are coming into widespread use this year.

LG Electronics has selected SH-Mobile for its new DVB-H capable handset, LG-U900 for the European market, in recognition of Renesas' wide-ranging track record and strong support capabilities, including middleware and development tools. This further expands the array of mobile DTV phones worldwide employing SH-Mobile. The LG-U900 was released in May 2006 by 3 Italia S.p.A., a subsidiary of the 3G telecommunications leader Hutchison Whampoa Ltd., to coincide with the rollout of DVB-H service in Italy, also a world's first.

The LG-U900 features a 2.2-inch widescreen LCD display and allows up to three hours continuous viewing of high-quality television broadcasts, even while traveling at high speed. It is also possible to watch TV while making phone calls or sending and receiving e-mails. SH-Mobile is a dedicated processor for mobile phone multimedia applications incorporating audio and video, and is already used in more than 120 commercially available handset models. Renesas has integrated a VPU4 (Video Processing Unit 4) hardware accelerator into SH-Mobile to provide support for DTV broadcasts.

The SH-Mobile application processor handles the H.264 video compression standard as well as MPEG-4 encoding and decoding without placing any additional load on the CPU. This makes it possible to reduce power consumption and provide extended DTV viewing capabilities. With the high-performance and low-power SuperH processor as its core, SH-Mobile implements all basic video processing and DTV functions in a single device.

In addition, Renesas provides specially optimized middleware components to extract top performance of the SH-Mobile on-chip modules as well as enhancing the functionality of mobile DTV phones, yet enabling improvement of application development efficiency and reducing development times.

As the market for mobile DTV phones continues to grow, Renesas will work to maintain and expand SH-Mobile's strong position in the digital video processor LSI field. Renesas is committed to offering advanced solutions for the mobile phone industry.

Notes

1. SH-Mobile (SuperH(TM) mobile application processor): Available
exclusively from Renesas Technology, this dedicated processor for
audio and video multimedia applications is designed for mobile phone
systems and connects to the baseband LSI. SuperH is a trademark of
Renesas Technology Corp.
2. DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting for Handhelds): A digital
video broadcasting (DVB) standard for mobile devices developed in
Europe.
3. ISDB-T (Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial):
A terrestrial digital TV broadcasting standard developed in Japan.
Portable devices such as mobile phones receive broadcasts using only
one of the 13 ISDB-T segments, hence the name "One-Segment." Service
began in April 2006.
4. DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting): A digital broadcasting
standard for mobile devices that was developed in South Korea. It has
two versions: T-DMB for terrestrial broadcasts and S-DMB for satellite
broadcasts. S-DMB service started in June 2005 and T-DMB service
became available the following December.

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