Matsushita Electronic Industries, Inc. has developed an MPEG4 Codec LSI called the "Marvie 3(MN195906)". They will begin shipments of the sample units in October, for a price of 5,000 yen.

The Marvie 3 (Advanced Real-time Video Codec Engine) is a MPEG4 Simple Profile Encoder/Decoder LSI aimed at W-CDMA devices. The LSI is able to encode/decode QVGA (320x240) resolutions of the MPEG4 and H.263 standards. Since the device employs 3 seperate data streams, utilization in cellular phones becomes clear, for features such as video phone, with 2 data streams for encoding and one for decoding.

Using a Vector-based DSP core, MPEG-4 Encoding/Decoding Engine, and Post-Noise Filter in tandem, Matsushita was able to drop the clock speed down to 66 MHz. Also, since power consumption sits at around only 60mW, and the image processing cost to the CPU has drastically decreased, overall power consumption for the device has fallen drastically.

In addition, Alpha Blending, editing, magnification/reduction, cropping, and right/left rotation functions are also featured. The package is CSP 288 pin, using a 0.13 micron manufactuing process.

Sources:
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20030715/pana.htm
http://matsushita.co.jp/corp/news/official.data/data.dir/jn030715-1/jn030715-1.html

Interpreter Notes:
And here I thought video phone was still a long way away. The H.263 doesn't exactly have the greatest video quality I've ever seen, but MPEG4 should do just fine for these applications. With low power consumption, it might actually be worth it to use a video phone.