MediaTek, a leading developer of system-on-chips for various multimedia applications, on Tuesday extended its licensing partnership with Imagination Technologies to TV market. As a result of the new agreement, the company plans to integrate high-performance graphics IP from Imagination into SoCs for inexpensive TVs.

MediaTek intends to implemented a multi-core member of Imagination's PowerVR SGX series 5XT graphics processor family. MediaTek will deploy the technology in SoC devices targeting the digital TV market. Thanks to PowerVR SGX 5XT graphics engine, TV-sets using the new MediaTek’s system-on-chips will be able to produce graphics effects on par with leading-edge consumer electronics, such as media tablets or game consoles.

The importance of high-performance graphics on consumer electronic is growing these days and for modern TVs quality graphics processor is nowadays a must have feature. ImgTec’s advanced PowerVR SGX 5XT graphics cores migrate to TVs, STBs and other consumer devices from such powerful mobile products as Apple iPad (including third- and fourth-gen) or Sony PlayStation Vita. One highlight of CES 2013 was the launch of LG’s new Cinema 3D Smart TV products featuring PowerVR series 6 “Rogue” graphics.

Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX 5XT that supports desktop application programming interfaces (APIs), including DirectX 10.1, OpenGL 3.2 and OpenCL 1.0 in addition to mobile OpenGL ES 2.x API. The heart of PowerVR SGX 5XT is USSE (Universal Scalable Shader Engine), the main programmable processing unit within each PowerVR SGX 5XT pipeline, is a scalable multi-threaded GPU shader processing engine that efficiently processes graphics as well as many other mathematically-intensive tasks. USSE can be programmed using the GLSL language that forms part of the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification, or in the C-based parallel processing language used in the OpenCL specification.

Under the terms of its licensing arrangements Imagination receives license fees, and royalty revenues on shipment of SoCs incorporating Imagination's IP. Imagination’s licensees in the consumer space include: Entropic, Intel, LG, MStar, MediaTek, Orca, Renesas, Realtek, SiS, Sigma Designs, Sony, Sunplus, ST Microelectronics and others.

Tags: Mediatek, PowerVR, Imagination, Imagination Technologies