Marvell at CES 2013
January, 2013, CES, Las Vegas—We talked with Marvell about their latest product releases. As a component supplier, it is usually easier to identify their OEM customers and products than the underlying products.
Some notable partners building smart screens include ASUS, Hisense, Netgear, Lenovo, LG, and TCL. These companies are offering new UHD TVs and GoogleTV boxes, based on Marvell’s second generation Armada 1500. The 1500 is a low-cost, low power, high-performance SoC that can support 3-D in UHD.
The dual 1.2 GHz ARM processor has sufficient processing power to address issues in UHD such as noise and artifact reduction while still providing enough compute to keep the smart TVs connected to the web and to a video source.
While video and TV are the most sexy applications, they are also producing a number of G.hn wireline technology products. These devices can provide 1 Gb/s connectivity over any home wiring, including power, coax, twisted pair, and optical. A number of companies are showcasing G.hn capabilities including Comtrend, Cambridge Industries, Billion, Delta Networks, and ZTE.
A USB plug-in module lets consumer add wireless connectivity and mobile printing to legacy printers allowing these devices to provide ongoing value to their users. The mPrint Cloud Printing Module supports traditional computing hardware such as laptops and desktops through a USB pass through mode implemented in the module. iOS-, Android- and Windows-based mobile devices connect to the module over WiFi, allowing customers to easily print their mobile content. The SoC includes all radios, baseband, MAC, CPU, memory, and a host interface.
A virtual desktop platform was developed with ZeroDesktop to bring Android-based cloud services and computing into an all-in-one solution. The virtual desktop account manager tool provides a content management hub for organizing, accessing, managing and sharing digital content locally, regardless of where it is stored. The Android-based Cloud OS also solves many of the challenges such as single-tasking user interface, inconsistent file systems, non-integrated productivity tools, and the lack of secure device sharing among multiple users.
The smart home needs a smart hub to control and manage all the appliances. A new Smart Hub home cloud platform is a low-power, always-on home server that enables remote services, including content access, smart energy management, health monitoring and personalized entertainment. All the wireless devices need to connect through some protocol, and a new 802.11ac 4×4 access point can fill in the spaces. The access point supports multi-stream video distribution. A 2X2 mobile MIMO chip combines 802.11ac, NFC, Miracast, and Bluetooth 4.0 protocols in a single package.
