This solution will allow subscribers to receive and to view streaming video on cellular terminals and to transmit streaming video from terminals equipped with a camera. This cooperation is an important step enabling high performance solutions for the emerging market for a new class of products combining mobile communication and multimedia features.
Intex Management Services (IMS; July 2000) predicts almost 1.8 billion worldwide cellular subscribers by the end of 2006. Over 50 percent of these subscribers will be using 2.5G or 3G technologies together with the respective mobile multimedia services. Video is a driving factor in the mobile handset market and MPEG-4 technology is essential to the encoding and decoding of streaming media for next generation cellular. According to market-research firm Scottsdale, cumulative shipments of approximately 30 million MPEG-4 chips are expected from 2001 through 2003, with 60 million shipments in 2004. Most of these devices are designed for the mobile handset market.
Mr. Takeshi Nakagawa, vice president of Toshiba Corporation’s Semiconductor Company, said; We have long and valuable experience of working with Infineon on leading-edge process technology for DRAMs and FeRAMs and look forward to bringing together our expertise in the field of mobile multimedia communications. We are strongly promoting our MPEG-4 LSI mainly in Japan, and this collaboration with Infineon will give us greater leverage in bringing it to world markets. We are confident that the combination of the two chips is set to be an attractive and advanced solution for 3G mobile terminals.
The cooperation with Toshiba on interfacing leading edge wireless and video processing chips fully supports Infineon’s approach to provide our customers with sophisticated solutions on the wireless market, said , Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Wireless Group at Infineon Technologies. The demonstration of this working system solution shows the way to a new class of products like web-enabled cellular phones or hand-held computing devices with full featured multimedia services.
