Our Solutions and Competitive Strengths

Expertise in Mixed-Signal, System-on-Chip Design. Integrating analog and digital circuits in a single semiconductor product is inherently difficult due to noise interference and other technical challenges. Our experienced teams of mixed-signal design engineers are skilled in integrating a variety of multivoltage, analog and digital functional building blocks in our SoC designs. Our analog circuits include analog to digital conversion, or ADC, digital to analog conversion, or DAC, power supply management, power amplification and high speed bus physical interfaces. Our digital circuits include embedded memory, micro-controller, embedded RISC CPU, DSP and dynamic power management. The high level of integration of our single-chip products delivers several benefits to our customers, including low power consumption, small size and cost effectiveness. All of our products are implemented in standard CMOS processes and manufactured using leading-edge process technologies.

Leading Design Capabilities in Audio, Imaging and Video Algorithms and Related Technologies. Our teams of designers have experience in multimedia systems and a variety of audio, imaging and video technologies, including leading industry standards and compression technologies such as MIDI, MP3, MPEG and JPEG. This enables us to integrate multiple multimedia functions in a single semiconductor product. We have created sophisticated high performance signal processing algorithms for many stages of multimedia processing, including sampling, filtering, coding and decoding, synthesis, compression, storage and playback. Using these algorithms, our multimedia SoC solutions are able to perform image, video and audio DSP functions such as data recovery, signal quality enhancement, noise reduction, sample rate conversion, auto exposure, white-balance and focus control, and video and audio signal reconstruction.

Proprietary Technologies Enabling High Performance Signal Processing Capabilities. Our proprietary multimedia processors enable high performance real-time processing of large volumes of audio, image and video signal data. Our proprietary adaptable processor architecture incorporates circuitry that can be modified by software commands to permit different types of tasks to be performed by the same processor. We believe that this architecture allows our products to achieve processing speed, signal quality and power consumption performance comparable to that obtained from competing fixed function hardware. However, unlike fixed function hardware, which is suitable for single applications such as video processing, our products can support a variety of multimedia applications such as audio, video and imaging using a single processor. This allows us to achieve levels of integration comparable to those offered by general-purpose semiconductor devices such as CPUs and baseband processors. Since our processors are designed solely for multimedia applications, rather than a broad spectrum of computing tasks, our processors avoid the need for the complex control software used by CPUs and baseband processors, and can therefore offer significantly better processing speed, signal quality and power consumption performance.

Application-Level Software Development Capabilities . We seek to differentiate our products and speed our customers' time-to-market through developing application-level software capabilities. We work closely with other technology leaders to enable innovative multimedia applications through the integration of value-added software features.

High Quality Customer Support . We provide our customers with complete reference design kits. We also customize our products and solutions based on our customers' product specifications and specific components such as sensors and LCD panels. In addition, we maintain a team of trained field application engineers to assist manufacturers in integrating our multimedia processors into their products, and to provide ongoing technical support, including engineering design review services and product evaluation, testing and debugging services.

Proximity to the Growing Electronics Design and Manufacturing Industry and Consumer Electronics Markets in China. We market and sell our products and solutions to an increasing number of companies in the electronics industry that have established design, manufacturing and assembly facilities in China. Our close proximity to these facilitates provides opportunities for efficient cooperation, marketing, manufacturing improvements and after-sales support. In addition, domestic consumer demand for electronic devices has increased significantly as a result of the rapid growth in the Chinese economy, which in turn further boosts demand for semiconductor products. We believe that we are well positioned to take advantage of the growth of the electronics design and manufacturing industry and consumer electronics markets in China.