“wireless handheld communication Device” - sound familiar, commonly known as the cell phone for many is just a magical piece of hardware which can do just about anything , make phone calls , access e-mails ,take pictures , play games and the list goes on and on . well it just got better . TI’s OMAP 3 architecture and the first offering named the OMAP3430 promises to revolutionize mobile multimedia.
designed to deliver laptop like performance, 3430 is also the industry’s first applications processor to be designed using the 65nm manufacturing technique, has the highest clock speed and marks huge advancements over the company’s OMAP 2 series .
The chip is based aorund the ARM Cortex A8 processor and also inclutes an integrated 2D/3D graphics processor, TI estimates that one can expect up to 4X performance increase in multimedia applications which means better audio and video playback , better games and a smoother interface, the integrated graphics processor also enables multiple formats like Real video , windows media video and mpeg , mpeg-4 etc, it features an on chip camera image pipeline which removes the need for external circuitry i.e camera phones based on it won’t weigh a ton, camera sensors up to 12 Mega-pixels are supported by the chip, the 3430 also features extended output capabilities , it can connect directly to VGA and S-Video outputs without needing any external interface , it even has fully compliant HDD interfaces and USB2.0 interface and also compliant with all the High level operating systems like Linux , Windows mobile and Symbian
a very high level architecture diagram is given below , more information can be found at the TI OMAP website
