What is SH-Mobile?

To help customers use engineering resources more effectively and develop products in less time, Renesas has worked steadily to extend a range of middleware offerings. We now offer many of these proven middleware packages, both general-purpose types for microcomputers and dedicated middleware for application-specific and custom LSI devices. This article highlights the dedicated middleware now available for SH-Mobile application processors.

Because the full performance of the hardware IP built into LSI devices can only be realized when that IP is combined with the appropriate middleware, Renesas supports customers by providing a comprehensive range of such middleware products. Thus, for the application processors for mobile phones in the SH-Mobile product line, we have for some time offered many middleware packages designed to extract the maximum performance from various on-chip IP modules, including video, sound, communications, and system applications (see Figure 1). Within this range, we have put particular effort into the development of video and sound middleware packages, with an emphasis on high image quality and high sound quality. Recently, we have also been extending our range of security middleware, including support for copyright protection.

In the area of video, for example, our middleware has been used extensively on SH-Mobile devices to implement various codecs, such as H.264, JPEG, MPEG-4, and 2D/3D graphics. SH-Mobile chips have a video-processing unit (VPU, also known as a video engine), and middleware for use with this unit is also available. The latest VPU versions are the VPU4 and the VPU4S, which can handle displays with 1280x720-pixel resolution, and development of the VPU5 is underway (see Figure 2). Middleware for the VPU4 implements MPEG-4, H.263, H.264, and JPEG codecs to provide flexible image encoding and decoding on mobile handsets. That middleware also supports the MPEG-4, H.264, and H.263 formats on the VPU4S.

The VPU middleware also incorporates control algorithms that deliver high image quality, including code for information encoding, inter-frame and intra-frame encoding control, determining quantization and cost coefficients, and implementing rate control. Network Adaptation Layer (NAL) support for ISDBT, DMB, and DCVB-H is included, as well.

In the area of audio, the Renesas middleware line-up spans a range that would be considered extensive even if only the products for SH-Mobile devices were considered (see Figure 3). The latest sound middleware includes support for aacPlus and WMA Pro (Windows Media Audio Pro) compression methods.

The aacPlus encoding, also known as "MPEG-4 High-Efficiency AAC", is one of the audio compression techniques used in MPEG-4. It achieves sound quality equivalent to the AAC standard previously used in MPEG, but with approximately half the data volume. Specifically, aacPlus can transfer 5.1ch sound at 128kbps or CD-level quality at 48kbps. The aacPlus decoder still handles parametric stereo, and a version that supports the standard used in terrestrial digital broadcasting has already been developed.

The extensive middleware we offer for the WMA audio compression technology developed by Microsoft covers the range from low to high bit-rates. Its support includes WMA Voice, WMA, WMA Pro, and WMA Lossless.

Among the many other middleware products we offer are packages for configuring systems, such as file system middleware. Also, because mobile phones that support music distribution have become increasingly common, we have added Digital Rights Management (DRM) middleware (see Figure 4). The solution available now is for the DRM scheme used by WM (WMDRM). Support for other DRM standards will be added progressively. One middleware package currently being developed is for the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) used to exchange content between Windows PCs and portable devices such as mobile phones. We are also developing a middleware package optimized for one-segment broadcasting that will make it easy to configure DTV systems.