Aricent Media EXPTM Suite Slashes Development Time and Complexity, Improves Multimedia Performance and Battery Life

Palo Alto, Calif., August 11, 2009 — AricentTM, a global innovation, technology and services company focused exclusively on communications, today announced the availability of Media EXPTM, a complete software framework for today’s multimedia-oriented consumer devices. Media EXP provides a performance and power optimised combination of essential middleware components necessary to deliver the most advanced multimedia experience for today’s consumer electronics (CE), including mobile Internet devices (MIDs), smart phones, entertainment devices, digital photo frames, portable media players, netbooks and more.

To compete effectively in what the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) forecasts to be $165B market in 20091, device manufacturers must effectively manage an increasing number of components and technologies such as network processors, power systems, radios, operating systems and CODECs, along with more sophisticated multimedia applications such as high definition video. This multi-source component reality, coupled with the need to improve energy efficiency and achieve additional certifications and compliance requirements such as Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) interoperability, has created significant development, integration and optimisation challenges for developers of multimedia entertainment and communications devices.

Aricent is a strategic supplier to the world’s leading consumer electronics and mobile device manufacturers, with its software shipped in more than 400 million devices. Aricent’s Media EXP was designed specifically to help device manufacturers meet growing consumer expectations for an innovative, high performance small screen multimedia experience as screen sizes, power budgets and product introduction cycles continue to shrink. Media EXP reduces the cost and time to market challenges associated with multi-vendor management and complex component integration and is compliant with the DLNA interoperability guidelines and connectivity protocols such as MTP and PictBridge. Further, Media EXP delivers up to 44% improvement in battery life along with more than 50% encoding and decoding performance improvement as compared with open source solutions.

“The world of consumer electronics is hyper competitive today. Cost, time to market, small screen multimedia performance and wireless connectivity all must be harmonised into a compelling user experience,” said Sajal Gupta, vice president of business development for wireless solutions at Aricent. “We introduced Media EXP to help our customers thrive in this environment and deliver innovative, high performance consumer electronics solutions while reducing costs and development complexity.”

The Media EXP Suite offers a comprehensive portfolio of pre-packaged, pre-optimised software and frameworks along with a wide range of ready-to-market applications necessary to deliver the most advanced multimedia experience. Aricent’s Media EXP suite provides all essential multimedia components including: high-definition multimedia CODECs, which enable the highest performance audio/video recording and playback; advanced multimedia end-user applications; communication applications for voice, video and Rich Communications Services (RCS); and device middleware interfaces, such as Real-Time Transport Protocol and Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTP/RTSP); Video Telephony - 324M; and Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld (DVB-H). Aricent’s software suite is available for most hardware platforms and supports leading operating systems such as Symbian, GoogleTM Android, Microsoft® Windows Mobile, Linux and Mentor Graphic’s Nucleus®.

For more information on the Media EXP™ suite and access to Aricent’s new whitepaper: “The 4 New Rules of Building Consumer Electronics for the Experience Era,” please visit http://www.aricent.com/multimedia.