As part of the long-term portfolio licensing agreement, Chips&Media and Freescale plan to work together to define multi-standard video codecs to drive very high resolution video applications in wireless and portable devices, such as next generation mobile TV devices, portable video players and digital camcorders.

"We sought a long-term agreement with Freescale because of their multimedia engineering expertise, low power innovation, market position and applications processors roadmap," said Dr. Joonho Jesse Lim, president and CEO of Chips&Media. "Our advanced video multi-codec technology integrated in i.MX processors gives customers a very compelling system solution to capitalize on the burgeoning mobile entertainment market."

Mobile TV is set to grow to a $1 billion worldwide market by 2009, with an annual growth rate of 12 percent to 17 percent, according Credit Suisse First Boston, May 2005. To address this high-growth market, the two companies plan to work together to develop next generation video IP blocks that are expected to be integrated into future Freescale i.MX multimedia applications processors. This is expected to enable high quality digital multimedia technology and highly integrated multi-codec
technologies on MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and H.264 standards with best-in-class digital video compression.

"Freescale's industry leading i.MX family of applications processors, combined with Chips&Media's expertise and video codec technology is a winning formula," said Berardino Baratta, general manager of Freescale's Multimedia Applications Division. "Chips&Media's MPEG-4 and H.264 codec adds real value to our considerable portfolio of video IP and gives us broad coverage for high performance video processing in low power, mobile handheld solutions."