Renesas Technology Corp. recently announced that its SH-Mobile application processor - a dedicated processor for mobile phone multimedia applications incorporating audio and video - has been incorporated into the new LG-U900 mobile handset manufactured by LG Electronics.
According to a
press release, the integration of the SH-Mobile chip in the LG-U900 makes it the first commercially available UMTS (W-CDMA) DVB-H capable handset in the world. Designed to support digital TV broadcasts, it 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.
The phone was introduced 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.
SH-Mobile comes with an integrated VPU4 (Video Processing Unit 4) hardware accelerator to provide support for DTV broadcasts. The application processor is said to handle 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.
Renesas also provides specially optimized middleware components in order to increase the performance of the SH-Mobile on-chip modules, as well as to enhance the functionality of mobile DTV phones (while at the same time enabling more efficient application development and reduced development time).
SH-Mobile is already used in more than 120 commercially available handset models, among them 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 also 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.
For more information about Renesas Technology Corp., visit
http://www.renesas.com.
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Patrick Barnard is Associate Editor for TMCnet and a columnist covering the telecom industry. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page. 
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