DECEMBER 6--Emblaze Research, a fully owned subsidiary of Emblaze Systems Ltd. (www.emblaze.com), and OmniVision Technologies Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA; www.ovt.com) have designed the EmblazeCam, a reference design for a unique video-camera accessory with built-in MPEG-4 compression. This reference design allows people to capture and send pictures and video clips on today's phones with existing networks, rather than waiting for 2.5G or 3G devices. The EmblazeCam connects to cell phones via the standard UART interface present on most of 700 million cell phones running on existing 2G networks. It enables video capture, recording, messaging, and conferencing applications.
Using the EmblazeCam reference design, cell-phone and PDA manufacturers can expand the multimedia capabilities of their devices via an add-on video camera. Such a solution enables image and video recording, video messaging, and two-way video conferencing applications. Since the audio and video compression is performed within the camera itself, no additional resources are used in the cell phone or PDA, leaving the CPU available for other tasks. The cell phones and PDAs require no internal hardware change.
EmblazeCam will be available to cell-phone, PDA, and accessory manufacturers in December 2001. It will be offered as a full manufacturing kit, including schematics, part lists, and all required software.
