NEC Electronics Debuts ASSP Designed to Resolve Resolution Discrepancies

Kawasaki, Japan, and Santa Clara, CA. February 4, 2009. NEC Electronics has introduced a new application-specific standard product (ASSP) to address differences between older image resolution and the higher resolution of current audio-visual (AV) display systems. Based on the company's single-frame super-resolution technology, the small, low-power ASSP reduces blurring that occurs when low-resolution images are expanded and displayed in high resolution. The ASSP sharpens out-of-focus images, smoothes rough edges, and refines contours by analyzing and processing information contained in one frame of data in real time. Using standard video interfaces for data input and output, designers can integrate the ASSP into a wide variety of consumer, industrial, medical, and automotive devices that handle images and video.

Instead of using a multiframe technique to process image data, which requires large-capacity external memory that, according to NEC, makes it expensive and difficult to create hardware capable of real-time processing, NEC Electronics' new technology enables very high-resolution processing with only one frame of image data. Reducing the processing load eliminates the need for external high-capacity memory, such as double-data-rate (DDR) SDRAM, thereby reducing cost and power consumption, and simplifying connections to existing systems.

The technology enhances image data from quarter video graphics array (QVGA) resolution (320 x 240 pixels) to wide VGA (WVGA) resolution (800 x 480 pixels) for clear image display on mobile phones and car navigation systems. The technology also achieves crisp images in 1920 x 1080-pixel high-definition (HD) television broadcasts by boosting image data in the 640 x 480-pixel VGA format ordinarily used for TV broadcasts and DVD storage to 6x the resolution.