LONDON — PACT XPP Technologies AG, a developer of a reconfigurable highly parallel processor, has redesigned its technology to produce the XPP-III version of its architecture and claimed that performance, for the first time, allows high definition video decoding without additional hardware accelerators.

On the original version of the XPP architecture, released in October 2000, PACT included 128 processors and an FPGA-like array of interconnectivity. Pact (Munich, Germany) added a package of video processor configurations and multi-standard video codecs for porting to its XPP-II parallel processor in January 2005.

The XPP-III is a software programmable standalone processor platform for signal processing applications. It combines a coarse-grained reconfigurable array with a sequential architecture for the control-flow code. Although the main target application is video, the XPP-III is a general purpose processor which can be used in other application fields such as wireless baseband processing, the company said.

Pact claimed it had overcome some of the development and programming issues that have dogged other multiprocessor architectures with the provision of a complete tool chain, including an ANSI C compiler, and accompanying application libraries. This would allow software developers to concentrate on application writing while making use of flexible hardware, Pact said. The company said that the architecture is well suited to compute heavy consumer applications such as video processing for high-definition television, for HDTV set-top boxes, and Blu-ray and HD-DVD decoders as well as mobile applications.

The company plans to bring the architecture to market as licensable intellectual property for customers working on system-on-chips. In addition, Pact plans to offer chips for either high performance or mobile applications. The SMeXPP-3H for high performance and the SMeXPP-3M for mobile would become available in 2007 in volume, the company said.

In addition, Pact provides software modules for decoding MPEG4 ASP, H.264, and VC-1 and AES encryption and decryption. Software libraries also comprise software building blocks for customers who want to port their own applications to XPP-III.