CAST RELEASES JPEG CORES; FAST, COMPACT ENCODER AND DECODER READY FOR IMAGE PROCESSING APPLICATIONS.

Semiconductor intellectual property (IP) provider CAST, Inc. recently announced the release of encoder and decoder cores for the popular JPEG image compression standard.

These cores are designed to provide high-speed, space-efficient ASIC or FPGA JPEG implementations for digital cameras, video conferencing systems, scanners, surveillance systems, and portable display devices. Their speed and simplicity makes them especially suitable for cost-effective motion JPEG applications, such as inexpensive consumer-oriented digital camcorders.

The cores offer baseline compliance with the ISO/IEC 10918-1 JPEG standard. They support all the defined JPEG data formats and possible scan configurations, handle any image size up to 64k x 64k, and feature four stream-defined Huffman and Quantization tables. The designs are programmable, fully-synchronous, and provide complete stand-alone operation with minimum memory requirements.

Significantly faster than many competing products, the new JPEG cores are expected to achieve over 70 Mega samples/second for fast FPGA families, and even higher rates for ASICs. The cores are also space-efficient: just 3700 slices were used in the slower Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA, with a speed of 55 Mega samples/second.

Licensed from graphics processing expert and CAST development partner Alma Technologies S.A. (www.alma-tech.com), the new JPEG-Fast-E encoder and JPEG-Fast-D decoder cores are available now, in HDL form for ASIC synthesis or optimized for Altera or Xilinx devices. Pricing varies; contact CAST or your local distributor for details.

The JPEG cores join CAST's general purpose IP (gpIP) line of cores, which also includes 8- and 16-bit processors, peripherals, buses, network interfaces, communications devices, and encryption functions.