LONDON — Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. has started embedding the reconfigurable chip technology that it acquired through the purchase last July of Elixent Ltd, initially into an AVC-Intra codec board that will be an add-on for a Panasonic solid state camcorder.

The SoC on the board uses the D-Fabrix Reconfigurable Algorithm Processor (RAP) developed at Elixent (Bristol, England). Matsushita says the board provides perhaps "the most advanced compression technology, adding support for real-time MPEG4-AVC (H.264) Intra-coded compression of 1080i/720p images."

Elixent was founded in 2001 as a spin-off from the research laboratories of Hewlett Packard Co. in Bristol. Matsushita was one of its main backers and the group became an R&D center under the Panasonic name.

The D-Fabrix processor is programmed from Verilog RTL and optimised for signal- and image-processing tasks. It can be dynamically reconfigured and to allow further products to be launched, with new high-performance image processing functions, without the time, cost and risk associated with respinning the SoC.

Matsushita makes the SoC used in the AVC-Intra board using a 130 nm process. It integrates multiple D-Fabrix arrays that are connected to ASIC blocks and to a standard 32-bit RISC core.

Andy Elms, Director of Panasonic Strategic Semiconductor Development Centre Europe (PSDCE) said: "Seeing the D-Fabrix V2 going into volume production has given our team in Bristol a real boost as we work on the implementation of our new V3 architecture in 45nm silicon. The project has been great team effort between Matsushita’s design teams in the UK and Japan. We’re now actively growing our Bristol team to support the rapid adoption of D-Fabrix into new consumer product ranges."

Last month Panasonic announced its DMR-XW200V Blu-Ray DVD player which uses a 45-nm Matsushita UniPhier LSI , said to be the first true 45-nm device of any kind available on the market, moving Matsushita ahead of all others in terms of the smallest process lithography in full scale production, even beating Intel.