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White Papers

White papers describe our products and technology in greater detail and are recommended for engineers and engineering managers. All white papers are in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format and require online registration.

Sound Solutions from ARC International: OEMs and chip suppliers looking for a solution that can provide a rich, engaging digital audio listening experience to the mobile consumer while saving bill-of-material and silicon cost will find this white paper informative. It describes a solution that can reduce OEM BoM cost up to $3 million while saving the chip vendor up to $1 million in silicon expense. In addition, the solution comes with power savings features that enable the semiconductor supplier to provide the OEM with a chip that can power an MP3 player up to 100 hours on a single battery charge.

A Brief History of Video Coding: Almost everyone in the industrialized world uses video compression many times each day. Whether you’re watching Oprah on TV, funny clips on YouTube, Disney on DVD or homemade movies of your family, all video storage and delivery mechanisms rely heavily on compression technology. Download this whitepaper for a brief history of video coding.

ARC® FPX White Paper: ARC FPX is a new set of licensable extensions for the ARC® 600 and ARC™ 700 families of 32-bit processor cores. The extensions provide high performance floating point math instructions which dramatically accelerate computations where high precision is required. Hardware floating point arithmetic is often required in applications such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS), printing, imaging, flat panel displays (FPD), 3D graphics transformations, sensors and measurement, and automotive controls.

ARC® Video White Paper: ARC Video White Paper: The ARC Video Subsystem is a configurable multi-standard video decoding subsystem for low-power, low-cost applications. The paper describes the ARC Video media subsystem, which decodes all major video-coding standards including H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Simple and Advanced Simple profiles.

ARC® VRaptor™ White Paper: In the fall of 2006, ARC International introduced its new VRaptor™ Architecture that is the basis for a series of media processing subsystems under development at ARC. This article describes current and future requirements of media processing systems and highlights how the VRaptor Architecture addresses them.

Customizing a Soft Microprocessor Core: This three-page white paper is a quick, easy introduction to user-customizable microprocessor technology and the ARCtangent-A4 processor. It covers the basic principles and explains the advantages of customizable soft IP over the rigid architectures of conventional CPUs and hard cores. (File size: 160 KB)

How to Reduce Time-to-Market for System-on-Chip Design: How can complex designs be achieved in less time? This paper takes a look at each stage in the design cycle and explores ways developers can exploit the potential of IP to actually reduce design costs, time-to-market, and overall risk. (File size 354KB)

Using Clarity to Automate the Design of ARC SoCs: When designing an integrated circuit for an embedded device, flexibility, performance and power are major technical concerns. Flexibility is required by rapidly changing standards and the need to reuse prior work as much as possible; this leads to programmable approaches involving a microprocessor, and requires careful partitioning and co-verification. Performance then becomes an issue: the codec that was working fine on an ASIC is too slow for a software-only solution; add multitasking, and it becomes a serious problem. Power consumption is always a threat, since most devices are portable,running on a battery, which is expensive and heavy. The fine engineering work of balancing and tuning these technical aspects then runs into the main business problem: time to market. With ever shorter lifetimes, devices need to be designed and produced ever more quickly to avoid being overtaken by the competition.