ATI Technologies would manufacture its IMAGEON 2240 media processor for mobile phones at Chartered Semiconductor, the contract manufacturer said on Tuesday. It is unknown whether the partnership will be extended to other devices as well, but this is the first time when ATI makes its products at the fabs of Singapore-based maker.

“The IMAGEON 2240 has been gaining good traction in the market place as a cost-effective, high-performance, and ultra-low power solution to meet the needs of the extremely competitive entry-level camera phone segment,” said Jim Seto, Vice President, ASIC NPI and Production Engineering at ATI Technologies. “Expanding production with Chartered who has proven 0.13-micron manufacturing capabilities, gives us added flexibility in our capacity needs to meet strategic growth market opportunities”.

ATI Technologies received functional samples of its IMAGEON 2240 media processor for high-volume camera phones from Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing recently. Following the successful prototyping, Chartered will start volume production on its 0.13 micron low-power, all-copper process, according to the company.

The IMAGEON 2240 enables support for an integrated digital camera, 15-frames per second image capture, electronic viewfinder, on-the-fly JPEG encoding of pictures, as well as JPEG and MPEG-4 decoding for viewing multimedia content on the handset. In addition, the integrated frame buffer memory and flexible LCD controller in the IMAGEON 2240 allows to offload the baseband processor, minimizing the power consumption in many operational modes. The IMAGEON 2240 does not provide 3D gaming functionality as well as SD/MMC cards controller.

IMAGEON 2240 is used across a lot of mainstream phones these days. Orders of the chip at Chartered may mean that either ATI is looking forward to reduce its manufacturing costs or secure additional chips in order to meet the increasing demand.