RMI and SPIRIT form strategic partnership
To Deliver High Quality Voice&Video for the Advanced Alchemy Processor Family
LAS VEGAS, 2009 International CES, January 8, 2009 – SPIRIT DSP, the world’s leading provider of voice and video software engines, and RMI Corporation, a leading supplier of multi-core, multi-threaded processors for communications and rich media applications, announced today that they have signed Partnership and Platform License Agreement to deliver high quality voice and video over IP for RMI’s Alchemy™ Processor family, an advanced MIPS-compatible processor solution.
According to the agreement, SPIRIT licensed to RMI its award-winning TeamSpirit Voice&Video Engine bringing high quality wideband real-time voice and video to the next generation electronics based on RMI’s highly integrated SoC, starting with the Alchemy Au1250, a power-optimized single-chip media processor. TeamSpirit Voice&Video Engine is a comprehensive pre-integrated solution with flexible architecture framework which includes a library of highly optimized speech and video codecs, voice and video synchronization tools, speech enhancement algorithms for superior voice quality and network optimizing functionality to handle varying delay (jitter) and packet loss. TeamSpirit is optimized to minimize CPU load and memory consumption, allowing OEMs to lower BOM-costs and to deliver video-enabled products at mass-market price. This partnership enables SPIRIT and RMI to deliver a complete video communication solution for vendors of Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), portable media players, personal navigation devices, home media players (HMP) and other audio/video applications, based on MIPS processor core.
SPIRIT and RMI are consolidating their experience for the booming category of products in the home networking and consumer market – Digital Multimedia, Home Media Players and Photo Frames. Adding rich IP-communications Multimedia and Photo Frames are going to be the hype at the electronic devices marketplace (according to IDC forecast, worldwide shipment of digital photo frames and home media players are expected to reach 42.3 million units in 2011 from 2.8 million units in 2006). SPIRIT technologies will bring the highest possible voice and video quality for the RMI® Alchemy Processor family that will include added functionality of peer-to-peer content sharing and communication (streaming IP radio and video content, VoIP and video calls) to Multimedia devices and Digital Photo Frame/Home Media Players.
“In the current fast-moving multimedia market where power consumption and efficiency is required, having a very efficient silicon solution enables our customers to implement high quality services with voice and video chat in a single package.” stated Mike Wodopian, vice president and general manager, RMI. “By working with SPIRIT on its unmatched video chat solution, we see great potential in our joint efforts to attract customers creating cutting-edge portable electronic devices with outstanding performance delivering more entertainment and communication to end-users than ever before.”
“Aimed to satisfy rising consumers’ demands for the rich content and IP-services OEMs are continuously unloading into the market new connected multimedia devices with increasing functionality and performance,” stated Slava Borilin, VP Products and Marketing, SPIRIT. “Partnering with RMI in this race we are continuously following our main strategy in delivering voice and video over IP to the cutting-edge multimedia devices. We see a good potential in MIPS-based solutions that grant efficient architectures and high performance with minimal consumption for the end-users multimedia devices supporting IP-based services. With the broad multimedia functionality and SPIRIT software RIM’s Alchemy is becoming the processor of choice adding rich multimedia and VoIP functionality to a wide range of home entertainment consumer products.”
About SPIRIT
SPIRIT DSP (www.spiritDSP.com) is the world’s leading provider of carrier-grade voice & video software engines since 1996. SPIRIT communication software is used in over 80 countries and powers more than 100 million voice channels. SPIRIT counts among its direct customers Adobe, ARM, AT&T, Blizzard, BT, China Mobile, Cisco, Ericsson, HP, HTC, Huawei, Korea Telecom, Kyocera, LG, Microsoft, NEC, Oracle, Polycom, Radvision, Samsung, Siemens, Skype, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, ZTE, and 200+ other telcos, OEMs and software vendors. SPIRIT smart-phone OEM customers’ shipments jointly exceed 60% share of the global market.