The digitalization has spread from PC to consumer electronics, and the tide is still on the rise. Since the 1 st Walkman launched 20 years ago, the digital revolution has commenced- consumers are eager for more personal, and easier-sharing music, higher-resolution visual quality, clearer voice communication, and faster access to data transmission, all of which have covered throughout the lifestyle, not mentioning influenced the used-to-be business model and market demands.

In terms of the web content, the web users are not satisfied with the pure-text content anymore, but fond of delivering their stories, photos, music…etc. in multimedia format, which drives the Web 2.0 trend, and pushes forward more real-time interactive services on net.

All aforementioned changes seem natural nowadays in daily life, but for the Systems Houses to provide the multimedia equipments/ facilities/ services, things are not that simple, especially when they try to cater for the market demands over timing and performance/cost as well.

To shorten customers' path to market without performance compromise, Grain Media (GM) was founded in Year 2005 with the commitment to “enable the next generation Internet streaming and handheld media SoC solution.”

At Grain Media, we provide professional ASIC design service with a well-developed high performance SoC infrastructure and an experienced ASIC team with video application experience. In addition to ASIC technology, we develop our own high performance video surveillance products and are expertise in SoC design/service. With in-house video and image data-path know-how and solution, we are able to provide SoC performance at ASIC architecture and leading video and image quality for customers' special ASIC requirement. Moreover, to meet increasing demand for SoC ASIC design, we build a dedicated platform service team and SoC development flow/tools to support the complex development process and accelerate SoC time-to-tapeout.

Our ASIC, SoC and video engine capability and services enable customers to realize their ideas in silicon better and faster, and be competitive on the market with lower cost and higher differentiation.

For video, GM develops the digital compression technology, including speech/audio/video codec algorithm, to optimize both the HW and SW systems, and further to achieve the low-power SoC design and advanced video codec to provide the high-resolution and efficient algorithm video streaming solutions.

Targeting the surveillance market, predicted as 74.4% growth rate from 2004 to 2010, GM introduced GM8120, a highly integrated MPEG-4/JPEG codec streaming SoC solution in 2005. Since then, more than 80% players in TWN have adopted GM 8120 in their surveillance systems to significantly reduce product develop time and cost. Furthermore, the recently-launched GM8180 , an H.264/MPEG-4/JPEG streaming SoC solution targeting especially on IP surveillance and IPTV station, can also meet the requirement of bandwidth hungry video input or output processing of mega-pixel IP cameras and multi-channel DVRs.

In the audio product line, GM's GM7 Portable Audio SoC solutions, including GM7005 , GM7020, and GM7006, all incorporate silicon-proven IPs, CPU architecture optimized for audio processing, and ultra low power design technology to present the leading MIPS/mW performance among the industry. Targeting the MP3 and the burgeoning MP4 players, forecasted to be doubled as 117 million units in 2007 than in 2006, the GM7 solutions not only provide a total solution for the users to develop their portable audio products.

With great success in market expansion since established, GM's technical strengths are also shown in its complete roadmap for multimedia solutions, covering both the video and audio field, that help customers, in a timely manner, to enable next generation internet streaming and handheld media SoC solutions!