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Barco's Real-Time Multi-Channel MPEG-4 Encoder Library Available on Cradle's Award-Winning CT3616 MDSP

Barco Silex, Barco's center of competence for electronic design services and IP focused on image and video-processing, and Cradle Technologies, a fabless semiconductor company delivering high-performance and flexible Multi-core DSP (MDSP) platform solutions for real-time video, audio and imaging applications, today announced the availability of a multi-channel SD MPEG-4 encoder on Cradle's CT3616 MDSP.

The new MPEG-4 video library from Barco has been architected to fully exploit the performance, scalability, and flexibility of Cradle's MDSP architecture. With its 24 on-board processing units, CT3616 is capable of encoding 16 CIF-resolution (or 4 D1-resolution) channels of MPEG-4 Simple Profile running at 30 fps. Optimized for security and surveillance applications, this MPEG-4 library is designed to deliver high quality video at low bit-rates, with built-in flexibility to support multiple resolutions and multiple channels, as well as a wide range of coding options such as Unrestricted Motion Vectors, AC/DC prediction, variable and constant bit-rates, and adjustable motion search range.

"The flexibility that was designed into this MPEG-4 library provides a great deal of control and ease of integration into larger systems, enabling customers to easily adjust the encoding parameters based on the number and resolution of video channels to be encoded," said Olivier Cantineau, Product Group Manager Multimedia at Barco Silex. "This flexibility is due, in large part, to Cradle's advanced multi-core architecture. In our experience with different DSP platforms, no other architecture provides the level of performance, integration, flexibility and scalability offered by Cradle's MDSP family."

Although optimized for security and surveillance applications, the new MPEG-4 library from Barco is designed with future enhancements in mind. The software can scale in features and capabilities to support a variety of applications outside of the surveillance market. The underlying software architecture relies on the scalability of the CT3600 MDSP family to offer a wide range of performance and features. With support for both the CT3608 and CT3616 devices, at both 233 MHz and 350 MHz speed grades, Barco's MPEG-4 library is ideal for a variety of media-processing applications.

Several Cradle customers have already started incorporating Barco's MPEG-4 library into their next-generation products. The recently announced companies include YOKO, Panacom, Vimagic, and InterAct, each with their own plans for incorporating one or all of the Cradle MDSP processors into a variety of different surveillance applications, ranging from IP cameras to IP video servers and DVRs. Having a single common programmable silicon platform with scalable video libraries, such as the MPEG-4 library from Barco, enables a great deal of design reuse for security equipment manufacturers, across their product portfolio. This design reuse, in turn, translates to lower development cost, decreased time-to-product and, consequently, higher return on their investment.

"One of the key benefits of a powerful, software-programmable architecture such as our CT3616 multi-core DSP is the flexibility to enable customer differentiation through product customization," said Kourosh Amiri, Vice President of Marketing at Cradle. "As we continue to grow our 3rd party partner network, having top-tier partners such as Barco will not only provide our customers with world-class image and video processing software libraries on our MDSP processors, but it also expands the network of Cradle developers who can provide hardware and software custom design services for our growing customer base."

"As a leading design house committed to providing high-quality hardware and software design services, we see a great deal of demand from our customers for both high-performance and flexible video-coding solutions. As the Cradle platform takes advantage of the natural data parallelism inherent in video and imaging applications to enable easier programming, the flexibility and leading performance of the Cradle architecture enabled us to reach new levels of channel density and flexibility with our high quality MPEG-4 encoder library," said Frederic Devisch, Sales &Marketing Manager of Barco Silex.

Barco Silex, Barco's center of competence for micro-electronic design, has acquired worldwide expertise in advanced image and video processing applications such as surveillance, digital cinema, aerospace, printing, and industrial and consumer electronics. The unique combination of high-end competence in image and video processing and custom design services (DSP/FPGA/ASIC/IP) provides optimal and tailored video processing implementations. For more information visit www.barcodesignservices.com.

About Cradle Technologies

Cradle is a fabless semiconductor company providing the best price/performance, most flexible and most scalable DSP solutions for real-time multimedia applications. Cradle's Multi-core DSP architecture innovation delivers high-performance scalable DSP processing with the flexibility, time-to-market and product differentiation benefits of processor-based programmable platforms. Coupled with a Rapid Development System and suite of application software functions, Cradle provides OEMs with all the building blocks necessary to enable flexible yet high-performance DSP designs. Cradle's corporate headquarters are located in Sunnyvale, California. For more information call 408-636-5000 or visit www.cradle.com.

About Barco

Barco, an international company headquartered in Kortrijk, Belgium, provides visualization and display solutions for professional markets. Barco designs and develops solutions for large screen visualization, display solutions for life-critical applications, and systems for visual inspection. Barco is active worldwide and has its own facilities for Sales & Marketing, Customer Support, R&D and Manufacturing in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. Barco is quoted on Euronext Brussels and is a BEL 20 and a Next 150 company (Euronext: BAR) (Reuters: BARBt.BR) (Bloomberg: BAR BB).

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