audio/videoZONE Products for the week of June 11, 2001
Analog Devices Says . . .
Analog Devices Announces World's First JPEG 2000 Image
Compression Chip
Digital still camera will integrate new hardware accelerator
to achieve best-in-class image quality
Analog Devices, Inc. announced the ADV-JP2000, the industry's first silicon
to support the new JPEG 2000 image compression standard. Targeting one of
the fastest-growing consumer electronics products on the market-the digital
still camera-the ADV-JP2000 provides the necessary hardware acceleration
required for JPEG 2000 image compression in a low-power, low-cost package.
Based on the company's Spatial Ultra-efficient Recursive Filtering wavelet
technology, also known as SURF wavelet technology, the ADV-JP2000 helps
digital still camera manufacturers to bring the benefits of JPEG 2000 to
the end user: superior image quality; scalability of the compressed source,
which gives users great flexibility in extracting images in varying degrees
of quality and resolution; precise control over image quality and memory
usage; and error resiliency for transmission of images in noisy environments.
"As the complexity of digital images has evolved, the demand has risen exponentially for the transmission of images via a range of consumer devices-such as digital still cameras and Internet-ready embedded devices," said Daniel Lee, Convenor of ISO (International Standards Organization) JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Groupan international imaging standards organization ), and Chief Technology Officer, Yahoo! Asia. "JPEG 2000 was designed from the ground up to meet this growing demand, providing a de facto standard for still image transmission that will change the way that users control images captured by digital cameras and Web Cam security systems, display images sent to them via Internet or cellular telephone, and much more. With the release of its new JPEG 2000 chip for digital cameras, Analog Devices is at the forefront of supporting the JPEG 2000 standard, ultimately meeting consumer demand."
The ADV-JP2000 and JPEG 2000
Wavelet technology-an arithmetic image transformation function that supports
complete image transform, rather than just subsections of an image-is the
core technology upon which the JPEG 2000 standard is based. As early as
1994, signal processing experts at Analog Devices saw the potential of wavelet
technology for image compression and capture. ADI invented signal-processing
algorithms that would make very high performance wavelet processing possible
with very little memory and very low power consumption. Analog Devices'
SURF wavelet technology includes these patented techniques, now available
in the ADV-JP2000 chip.
It is fabricated in 0.18uM CMOS, consumes 100 mW in active mode and <100uA in power down mode, features a nominal operating voltage of 1.5 to 1.8 volts and 3.3 volt I/O, and comes in a tiny package: 48-pin LFBGA. The ADV-JP2000 is capable of compressing five 3-MegaPixel images in 1 second. In addition, the ADV-JP2000 provides lossless compression of images of up to 10-bits/component and lossy support of up to 14-bits per component. This provides significant performance advantages over the original JPEG standard, which offered only 8-bits/component and did not support both lossless and lossy compression in a single format.
"Based on our SURF wavelet compression technology, the ADV-JP2000
demonstrates the power of JPEG 2000 image compression for digital still
images," said Roger K. Smith, product line manager, video products
group, Analog Devices, Inc. "Users will not only gain more control
over the quality and quantity of images stored on their digital cameras,
they will also be able to take complex images from their cameras and transmit
them over the Internet. The user on the receiving end will then be able
to select image size and quality based on available bandwidth."
analogZone Says . . .
The advent of JPEG 2000 is going to change the way that digital cameras store their images. More images of more consistent quality will be stored, while the ability to store simple images in a simple way will be enhanced. Wavelet compression, which this reviewer has been in favor of for many applications for a number of years, is an ideal way to address storage of the standard. Analog Devices' prior experience with wavelets puts the company in good stead to take advantage of this new market opportunity.
This part can compress images in a lossless mode when they are at a rate greater than 10 Mpixel/s, and in lossy modes at much higher pixel rates. Compression can be lossless with 8- and 10-bit components, and lossy with up to 14 bits. Both encoding (compression) and decoding (expansion) are supported in the IC and for component interleaved tiles the maximum tile size supported is 160 x 128 and the minimum is 8 x 8. Three component mode supports 4:2:2 tiles of Y:Cb:Cr. Two-component interleave and single components can also be supported with tile sizes up to 256 x 256.
A single 16-bit asynchronous SRAM interface allows connectivity with most microcontrollers. Single and dual address DMA transfers are supported to and from on-chip FIFOs. The chip includes the full entropy codec and wavelet pipe and quantizer. A PLL is included to handle the on-chip clock requirements from a reference source.
Providing Analog Devices can convince the market this is the right solution
for handling JPEG 2000 (and there is no fundamental reason why it should
not) this part -- and its later derivatives could become the standard product.
That would also help further legitimize ADI's other wavelet offerings. The
ADV-JP2000 uses a 3.3-V I/O and a 1.8-V core and is in a 48-ball BGA measuring
7 x 7 mm. In production, it is priced at $14 in 10-k piece lots.