Mentor Tunes Developers Into 3-D TV

Looking at the 3D TV market as a key opportunity? Mentor Graphics has just announced a multimedia platform that aims to help. The company’s new 3D TV Multimedia Verification platform expands its presence in the digital TV design arena with a tool set that enables designers to develop and test their software against multiple 3D TV formats on their systems-on-chip (SoC) before actual silicon is available.

The platform consists of the Veloce family of emulators and the iSolve Multimedia product for HTDV and HDMI 3-D applications. The combo delivers what Mentor officials claim is verification at thousands of times faster than software simulation. The reason? Compared with the limited signal-level displays of traditional simulation tools, the Mentor 3D TV Multimedia Verification platform provides direct visualizations of 3-D pictures and frames, Mentor officials explain, resulting in a more productive debug environment to develop cutting-edge 3-D TV products in a shorter time frame.

While the 3-D TV arena is still in the nascent stages, there’s no doubt that interest in 3-D technology is on the rise. A study released by Futuresource Consulting projected that about 15 million 3-D TVs will be in homes across the United States by the end of 2012–a figure that is up from a previous Futuresource study, which estimated that 4 million 3-D TVs were sold worldwide last year and that only 8 million would be purchased globally in 2011.
Still, 3-D TVs are now widely available from a variety of manufacturers, and there’s no reason not to believe that 3-D content and technologies will eventually find their way into mobile devices like smart phones, handheld game consoles and tablets. I suppose now is as good a time as any to hit the ground running with tools that can make deployments easier for system developers.