Toshiba MeP alliance partners announced cooperative marketing strategy to promote MeP business

Kanagawa, Japan, June 1st, 2004: 12 companies of the MeP (Media embedded Processor) alliance partners announced that they would promote co-marketing activities to increase MeP business. MeP is a 32-bit RISC processor that is configurable by users according to their applications. A consistent development flow is now ready for the market - from system level design to back-end design by commercial open tools for MeP-integrated SoC (system on chip) development. Contracting services is also available. Toshiba Corporation that originally developed MeP will give their all-out support to these activities with partners.

MeP or this technology is defined by Toshiba and the 12 MeP alliance partners as: "A new platform to develop SoC used for digital consumer products such as DVD(digital versatile disc) recorder or digital TV that are rapidly enlarging its market. And a new alternative to existing DSPs (digital signal processor) or embedded processors used for cellular phones, vehicles, or other industrial systems.

The 12 companies making up the MeP alliance are: Advanced Data Controls Corp., Inter Design Technologies Inc., Oki Network LSI Co., Ltd., CDEX, Sophia Systems Co., Ltd., Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd., Synopsys Japan , Pacific Design Inc, Celoxica Ltd.(UK), Coware Inc(US), Red Had, Inc(U.S), and Sonics Inc(U.S).

As part of the co-marketing activities, "MeP World 2004" (Tokyo Kokusai Forum) will be held on August 26, introducing products and services from the above mentioned companies. Also these companies will take part in the "MeP USER FORUM in US" in Autumn.

Furthermore, Education & Consulting services will be using MeP in association with participating partners. Related information on partners products, services and activities is now available on the website: http://www.mepcore.com.

From Tosiba Corporation that originally developed MeP:
"MeP is the processor that was originally developed in the SoC Research & Development Center, Toshiba. We announced the MeP core development and the MeP De-fact Standard strategy on April 22, 2002. We are currently developing "MeP-c3" that will provides more configurable items as the advanced version of "MeP-c2" , and also developing the higher performance "MeP-h1" core. MeP alliance partners and Toshiba will perform co-marketing activities in order to promote MeP de-fact standard, increasing the MeP business opportunities of partner companies .
(Tohru Furuyama, Ph.D., General Manager, SoC Research & Development Center, Toshiba Semiconductor Corporation)

From Sophia Systems Co., Ltd.
We provide Microprocessor Development Systems to develop the MeP-integrated embedded systems internationally. Our MeP core evaluation board is a DVK reference design board to evaluate MeP performance. With the cooperation of Oki Network LSI, we also offer OEM/ODM business to MeP users. In addition Sophia Systems offers the debugging solutions such as Full ICE (with full bus trace and emulation memory capabilities), JTAG emulators (efficient for software development), and RTOS-supported debuggers. The use of our emulators will increase the efficiency of development for MeP-integrated embedded systems. We will promote co-marketing activities to incresase MeP business and improve the customer satisfaction with MeP alliance partners.
(Tasuku Kashihira, CEO of Sophia Systems Co., Ltd.)

About MeP:
MeP is the processor that Toshiba originally developed in order to perform digital signal processing of media products such as digital television and DVD recorder. Toshiba already has design wins in their in-house DVD players, cellular phones, and LSIs for vehicle, etc., that demonstrates MeP's great features. The license to use MeP IP is available without initial expenses and is available to any fabless company or manufacturer to develop SoC for digital/media products.

MeP targets the digital/media products that need to comply with the many technical standards involved in the processing of image/audio/graphics inside products that require high performance LSI. With these standards constantly changing, LSI needs to be flexible - allowing modification of functionalities in a short time if needed. To solve these problems, MeP was created as a SoC design platform.

The greatest technical feature of MeP is that the bottle neck processes associated with software execution can now be replaced by hardware execution allowing users to optimize performance or power consumption. The user can add optional instructions according to their application and set up the cache capacity by themselves. Furthermore, MeP provides user extension units such as DSP unit, VLIW (very long instruction word) coprocessor for higher speed operation, UCI (user-customized instructions), and Hardware engine.

Application examples:
System LSI for cellular phones:
One MeP module, an MPEG4 codec, and 2- or 3-dimensional graphics engine, 20 M bytes of DRAM are installed on the system LSI "TC35285XBG" for cellular phone

System LSI for DVD player
"TC90600FG" is a MeP SoC for the commercial DVD players. As the back-end processor, two MeP modules are used for video and audio processing respectively.

Image recognition LSI for vehicles
MeP SoC is used for obstacle detection from all angles using stereo view of two cameras, and for the system to keep
the lane. Three MeP modules are integrated for front/side image processing.

Detailed MeP Overview
MeP can be optimized by users (developers of MeP-integrated SoC), according to their applications which require multimedia processing functionality such as video and audio of digital consumer products.
The MeP's main features are:
1. Provides configurability which allows for optional instructions and extensibility to improve functionality and
performance through the addition of dedicated hardware.
2. Top-down design flow based on C language
3. The existing design resource, IP (Intellectual Properties) for 3-layer architecture (MeP Core, MeP Module, and MeP SoC) has high reusability

Toshiba already has design wins in their in-house DVD players, cellular phones, and LSIs for vehicle, etc., that demonstrates MeP's great features. SoC has already been put to practical use into the market. MeP is now offered as an open platform IP provided by Toshiba. MeP is available as an IP that requires no initial expenses. More than 50 companies, such as software houses, EDA tool venders, design house,s and Si foundries, have participated in the MeP alliance partner program that began the activity in April, 2002.

In order to effectively develop MeP-integrated SoC, a series of design tools are required for software development, system level design and logic design. Now, the commercial open tools are offered into the market by partner companies and those tools have the same capabilities with Toshiba's tools that were, in the past, only available for Toshiba internal use. Please refer to the following about the commercial open tools.

1. In order to develop MeP-integrated SoC, MeP Integrator("GNUPro for MeP) is used to generate software development environment, customizing simulators, compilers and debuggers, according to the user's MeP configuration. Next, the generated tools are used to verify the bottle neck of software (Supported by "GNUPro for MeP" or "MULTI"). In the future, the division verification tool will be required to develop the large-scale distributed processing system using several MePs (Supported by "TsbSAA" in the near future).
2. Next, the software with the extracted bottle neck and hardware will be co-verified. At this stage, co-design&verification tool of C language based hardware/software is required. ( Supported by "ConvergenSC" and "VisualSpec". Or supported by "DK Design Suite" in the near future)
3. Furthermore, the verified hardware performs physical design, anticipating frequency and areas with high precision. (Supported by "Reference Design Flow"). At this stage, physical compiling tool, ("Physical Compiler") is available.
4. Microprocessor Development Systems are available to verify the developed software or system. (Supported by "MeP core evaluation board" and "UniSTAC II")
5. Customer Contract Service is available for the front-end design or all designs since the backend design using Si foundry. IP("Sillicon Backplane") is also getting prepared for MeP-integrated SoC design.