IMG Tech – Full circle of IP & shipping over 1B units
October 2012 – At a San Jose press event, the team from Imagination Technologies in the UK held a briefing to overview their current product offerings and their historical product shipments reaching the 1B unit level. The company is on track to be included in products that are shipping at the rate of 1M units/day for new chips. Approx half of the current products shipped (500M units) included video cores. The future products have an increasing penetration on video products, but also include their IP products in other spaces. The following figure shows the full circle of products in video, CPU, connectivity, RF, cloud services, VoIP & VoLTE and Ray Tracing (Caustic).
A number of these IP blocks are incorporated into their consumer end product brand “Pure” which has been launched in the US and Europe. The Pure products are in the Internet Radio and SetTop Box space. Their Meta CPU has been shipping for several years as a secondary processor for video applications managing non-graphics rendering functions and computing enviroments. The Meta cores are also as a standalone embedded controller for commercial and industrial control applications. Their IP is distributed over mobile phones, handheld computing, home control, automotive and emerging markets such as home health care. The diversity of the products and the number of designs in the pipeline have them on track to be at the 1B/yr run rate by 2016.
Imagination Technology IP Overview
The company is currently at 1200+ employees with 700 of them located in the UK and Poland. Their main expansion for manpower is currently the US, and is based around their CA offices in Santa Clara and San Diego. The Santa Clara offices are based around the HelloSoft acquisition which is targeting the V.VoIP and VoLTE markets with SDKs and IP blocks for full digital communication. The Caustic Professional products are an IP block and a plug-in card for the PCIe bus that uses a custom chip created by IMG Tech. The plug-in card is an accelerator with a hardware coded ray tracing engine that allows for real time generation of the 3D images.
For embedded applications the Meta CPU is being used. It is also incorporated as the core processor in the Pure products that utilize the Ensigma RF receivers and the Ensigma network connectivity IP. These tie trhought the Flow cloud services. These products are illustrative of the both vertical penetration plan and the “integrated experience” plan for market penetration. The reason for the diversification, including moving the graphics from pixel paint to include GPU compute, is to have the agility to address new markets that are in the initial stages of formation. The goal of the product plan is to address the needs of the full market – not just finite markets such as those with screens, those with radios, those with 3D graphics – but the evolving market that includes and supercede those TAMs.
Their expansion is both by development and acquisition. The Caustic and VoIP products were acquisitions, and the RF and GPUs were traditional R&D products. The acquisition side was just recently enhanced with the putchase of the MIPS RISC CPUs and patent portfolio. This will accelerate their embedded presence in both custom chips and FPGA based designs. Many of the MIPS applications already included interface to the PowerVR cores, so the further integration to a single company focus should be fairly quick.
To support the diversity of the product line and to hasten the implementation and adoption by the SOC and FPGA community, the company relies heavily on conformity to industry standards. They are founding members of many of the groups – such as the HSA – and are on the key driving committees for most of the programs they participate in. The following graphic details a number of these groups they participate with.
IMG Tech Standards and Technology
