LONDON — Silicon Hive (Eindhoven, the Netherlands) , the Philips Electronics spin-out that specializes in IP to enable semiconductor companies to make fully-programmable SoCs for communications and consumer electronics applications, has started licensing the HiveFlex VSP 2500 video signal processor for Full High Definition (HD) video codecs.

The company says the multi-processor — which is delivered as a synthesizable soft IP core, with support for synthesis, characterization, test-vectors and test logic insertion — is the first such fully-programmable video coding solution for Full HD (1080p) available.

It is targeted at portable terminals, mobile phones and IPTV systems.

The Hive VSP 2500 has a scalable tile architecture that works by adding or removing tiles. It allows SoC platform designers to address various operating points in terms of area, power, and performance.

A two-tile system can be programmed in software to support 1080p 30fps H.264 baseline Level 4 decoding using a 225MHz Clock. Adding more tiles extends the functionality, addressing encoding and transcoding applications, and even enables further video processing such as scaling, frame-rate conversion, and noise reduction.

Other standards are programmable in software as well, including but not limited to, VC-1, MPEG-2 & MPEG-4. The solution is also scalable to lower performance points like HD-ready (720p) & SD (576p).

The processor builds on the tiled architecture of the already announced VSP 2200 series. The full HD decoding hardware is supported by three VLIW processors; two of these have the tile architecture, while the third, a Stream Processor, is used for entropy coding.