SiS9700 E-Reader SoC — Offers New Paperless Reading Experience
May 31st, Taipei– Silicon Integrated Systems Corp. (SiS) today unveiled the first generation of E-Reader SoC, SiS9700 mainly integrating PDF/ePUB accelerator, the electrophoretic display controller, and the loading dependent frequency/voltage scalar to ultimately sustain up to15000 page flip/1500 mAh battery life. The SiS9700 can also be used in conjunction with the SiS9730 EM touch processor to equip friendly human interface for supporting versatile handwriting experience. SiS is committed to continue developing new innovative technologies to provide customers with even more competitive products while expanding its e-reader market and enhancing consumer reading experience.
The integrated PDF/ePUB accelerator in SiS9700 mainly comprises the AES/RC4/SHA1/MD5 security engine, the OpenVG scalable vector graphic, and the JPEG decoder, in an attempt to boost performance for deciphering, decoding and rendering the PDF and ePUB documents with minimum CPU processing time, and thereby to extremely reduce the power consumption. The Integrated eletrophoretic display controller utilizes the locality/parallelism refresh scheme to save power, and supports up to 16 levels grayscale waveform for up to 2048×1536@50Hz panel. The loading dependent frequency/voltage scalar actively gauges the system loading and dynamically adjusts the operating frequency and operating voltage of the processor and various H/W accelerators on the fly. Thus, when the user is reading a document, listening to music and downloading content at the same time, the SiS9700 will boost to the performance mode to deliver seamless user experience. When the user is just reading a document, the SiS9700 will automatically switch to energy-saving mode by reducing the operating frequency and voltage to extend the battery life and reduce the number of recharges.
Key differentiated functions integrated into the SiS9700 include the display timing controller for supporting variously dimensional panels, and audio codec with stereo speaker or headphone outputs for playing the music or text to speech, or with microphone input for voice recording. The associated front-end audio processing engine supports MP3 / WAV / WMA / AAC decoding, and audio effect synthesizing such as Volume, Balance, Mute, & EQ, … , etc. A variety of peripherals such as LPDDR controller, USB2.0 host/device controllers, SD/SDHC/MMC/SDIO/SPI/UART/I2C interface, NAND flash controller, and RTC, etc are also provided for WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G communications modules and other peripheral devices to enable mobile network connectivity for the user. The SiS9700 uses 15mm x 15mm LFBGA package technology.
“SiS will continue to invest in the research and development of innovative e-book technologies to provide our customers and users with better e-book products and a better user experience. Our target is the massive e-book market.” said Michael Chen, President at SiS. “Our R&D capability and innovative technologies will enable customers to master the mysteries of e- reader design and inject new life into the market.”
SiS9700 is slated to enter volume production in the third quarter of this year. Sample products will be demonstrated at COMPUTEX 2010 during June 1st to June 5th. You are cordially invited to visit the SiS booth at C621/C623 in the Taipei Computex Exhibition Hall 1 and to learn more about the trends in the e-book reader market.