Santa Clara, Calif.—Ambarella Inc. announced its third-generation low-power A3 System-on-a-Chip (SoC), which is targeted at high-definition (HD) camcorders using H.264/AVC compression technology.

The SoC comes in two versions: the A350, which supports the 1080i 60- interlaced HD standard, and the A380, which supports the emerging 1080p60 progressive video format.

The A3 HD SoC enables the development of full high-resolution camcorders at high image quality with smooth 60 frames/second video. Ambarella's A3 single-chip H.264 codec is capable of encoding full 1080p60 at 1920 pixels per line resolution.

In addition, A3 integrates a high-performance image processing pipeline with high-speed signal acquisition, still-image compression, audio compression and all key system functions.

According to Ambarella, its patent-pending platform delivers a 2.5x compression gain over current MPEG-2/4 products, providing the efficiency required to store HD video content in flash-based memory, hard disk drive or recordable DVD.

Ambarella Inc., 1 408-734-8888, www.ambarella.com