Marvell Unveils ARMADA 1500 Plus (88DE3108) SoC for Android and Linux Smart Video Platforms

Building on top of it ARMADA 1500 SoC for Google TV, Marvell has recently announced the ARMADA 1500 Plus (88DE3108) HD secure media processor SoCdesigned for smart video products based on Android 4.2.2, and Linux, such as media players, OTT boxes, hybrid set-top boxes and smart TVs. ARMADA 1500 Plus features two ARM Cortex A9 cores, Vivante GC1000 and GC300 GPUs, respectively for 3D and 2D graphics,  and integrates an HDMI receiver and Gigabit Ethernet. Hisense will be among the first to use the platform with the upcoming H6 Smart TV and Pulse Pro set-top-box, but details have yet to be released for these two products. Here are the key features of 88DE3108 SoC: Processor – Dual core Cortex A9 with over 6000 Dhrystone MIPS Dedicated 3D and 2D graphics acceleration – dual threaded unified shader (Vivante GC1000 and GC300) with support for OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 and DirectFB. Video vMeta […]

Tizen 1.0 SDK and Source Code Release

The Tizen Technical Steering Group has announced, today, the release of Tizen 1.0 “Larkspur”. Tizen 1.0 release provides several new SDK features and improvements including: Simulator: A new browser-based tool that supports the Tizen APIs and allows you to run and debug your web applications, and simulate running applications with various device profiles. IDE: Enhancements include more flexibility around templates and debugging tools. Emulator: Significantly improved emulator performance through Intel’s Hardware Acceleration Manager for Windows and OpenGL acceleration for Linux. Updates to the platform source code include: Web: Support for additional features of W3C/HTML5 specification Location: Support for POI (Point of Interest) and route search Connectivity: Wi-Fi Direct key features added You can see the full list of changes by reading the release notes for the SDK and the source code. Tizen has also added a bug tracker and a wiki for the community and a few back-end changes have been […]

Texas Instruments Releases Android 4.0.3 DevKit for Beagleboard-XM and Beaglebone

After collaborating with arowboat, android-porting and Linaro communities, Texas Instruments has released Android 4.0.3 development kits for Sitara microprocessors which support Beagleboard-XM (Sitara DM3730) and Beaglebone (Sitara AM335x) low cost development boards, as well as other Sitara-based evaluation modules and development boards. Android 4.0.3 Devkit for Beaglebone If you have a Beaglebone (and an LCD or DVI-D cape), you can use TI Android ICS 4.0.3 DevKit v3.0.1, a release providing an Android ICS 4.0.3 distribution for TI’s Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex A8 Processors. This DevKit provides Android sources with pre-integrated SGX (3D graphics accelerator) drivers, TI hardware abstraction for Audio, WLAN & Bluetooth for TI WL1271 chipset, USB mass storage, etc, as well as development and debugging tools such as a toolchain, TI CCSv5, ADT plugins and more, which are provided to build custom Android solutions for the embedded market more easily. The pre-built images includes Android default apps, multimedia […]

Marvell Releases Kinoma Play for Android and Kinoma Create SDK

Marvell has just announced the availability of the preview release of Kinoma Play for Android which includes a suite of 50 apps enabling digital media, social networking, location, and search. It’s somewhat surprising that a silicon vendor releases a processor agnostic software for Android, but here’s the reasoning behind it: “Marvell is investing in our Kinoma software platform because we understand the importance of great software to the success of our customers. Our vision of the Connected Lifestyle guides our product development. Kinoma Play truly shows the power of that Connected Lifestyle,” said Weili Dai, Co-Founder of Marvell. “I believe our customers can now build on Kinoma to bring increased value to their own products. Android is just the first stop. We’re working to bring Kinoma to additional Marvell-powered devices.” Kinoma Play Kinoma Play includes 5 dashboard: Play shows near real-time information from every Kinoma app with news, social networks, […]

Embedded Artists and NXP Release The First ARM Cortex-M Android Open Accessory Development Kit

Embedded Artists and NXP introduced the TN-20764, a board that can be used with Android Open Accessory Application (AOAA) development kit that features 2 NXP Cortex-M MCUs, at Embedded World 2012. The board includes Ethernet, CAN and IEEE 802.15.4 interfaces as well as a remote CAN node, enabling designers to develop accessories for consumer applications,  as well as home, building and industrial automation applications requiring different types of connectivity. There are already Arduino and PIC-based Android Open Accessories, but this board is the first AOAA kit based on ARM Cortex-M micro-controllers. As mentioned above, the board features 2 Cortex M micro-controllers: The NXP LPC1769, a 120-MHz Cortex-M3 based MCU, provides the interface to the Android mobile device via its full-speed USB transceiver . The LPC1769 also includes 512 KB flash and 64 KB on-chip SRAM, an Ethernet MAC, a CAN 2.0B controller, an 8-channel, a 12-bit ADC, a 10-bit DAC, […]

Tizen Releases Beta Source Code and SDK

Back in January, Tizen preview SDK and source code was made available. Today, Tizen has released the beta source code and SDK. Here are the main changes compared with the code preview: SDK support for Windows, in addition to Ubuntu SDK source code is now available Tizen Web UI framework extends jQuery Mobile to make developing web applications easier with optimized widgets. Tizen Web API provides more features, such as setting an alarm, accessing media contents, retrieving system information, and more. Tizen uses a bootloader based on U-Boot. The Tizen team emphasizes that this version is Beta and that it is not yet designed for use to create production applications. Since Windows is now supported, the development machine requirements have slightly changed as follows: Ubuntu 10.04/10.10/11.04/11.10 32-bit, Windows XP SP3/7 32-bit (Mac version will be available soon) At least dual-core 2 GHz CPU (recommend VTx supported by CPU) At least […]

Tizen Releases Source Code and SDK Previews

Tizen, a new Linux based HTML5 operating systems aimed at mobile and consumer devices, was announced at the end of September 2011 without much detail. Today, Tizen has posted a set of pre-release tools, source code and related documentation to give application developers an early look at Tizen. Tizen Alpha (pre-1.0) is a very early preview and is not yet designed for use to create production applications. They specifically released the following items: Tizen source code preview – Operating system source code, including middleware, basic UI, and menu interface Tizen SDK preview – SDK & APIs: Web IDE, Emulator, Web API documentation, and Toolchain If you plan to try Tizen SDK, you development machines should match or exceed the following requirements: Ubuntu 10.04/10.10/11.04 32-bit (Windows and Mac version will be available later) At least dual-core 2 GHz CPU (recommend VTx supported by CPU) At least 2 GB of RAM memory […]

Marvell Armada 1500 Google TV Reference Design

Marvell announced that its Foresight Platform, powered by Marvell ARMADA 1500 HD Secure Media Processor System-on-a-Chip (SoC), will be officially used by Google TV (replacing Intel CE4100 SoC) and be introduced at CES 2012. The company said Google TV smart TVs, set-top boxes (STB) and blu-ray players based on its platform would be available later this year. The Foresight Platform uses Marvell’s Qdeo video processing technology designed to deliver improved 3D video, rich audio, 3D graphics and TV-friendly Web content thanks to noise reduction, de-interlacing, low bit-rate internet video enhancement and other enhancement techniques such as Adaptive Contrast Enhancement (ACE) and Intelligent Color Remapping (ICR). ARMADA 1500 (codenamed 88DE3100) contains Marvell’s ARM v6/7-compatible PJ4B SMP super-scalar dual-core CPU. The chip is designed to enable PC-like processing power to support Web browsing with support for Flash and other key technologies – with the aid of more than 6000 Dhrystone MIPS of […]