The group is poised to ratify as early as Wednesday (July 23) version 1.0 of its OpenGL Embedded Systems (ES) standard that members hope will see widespread use in cellular phones.

Epson, STMicroelectronics and PC chip set designer Silicon Integrated Systems (SIS) top the list of new chip companies joining Khronos. Epson and STM already field a host of chips for cellphones while SIS declared its plan to move into wireless devices earlier this year.

Other new hardware companies joining the group include chip and core providers ChipWrights (Newton, Mass.) and SunPlus Technology Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

OpenGL ES hardware accelerators will begin to ship by the end of the year, according to Neil Trevett, chairman of Khronos Group and vice president of marketing for member company 3DLabs (Sunnyvale, Calif.).

"You will definitely see people shipping 1.0 accelerators before the end of the year," Trevett said.

"There is a clear and urgent need for 3D gaming on handsets. Gaming is the beachhead market in mobile graphics just as it was with the PC," he added.

Most OpenGL ES products shipping this year will be software implementations using fixed-point graphics. Hardware accelerators offering floating-point graphics will arrive mainly in 2004, Trevett said. Most of the hardware will come in the form of 2 to 3mm² intellectual property cores with their own memory and CPU bus for integration on an ASIC or application processor, he added.

"For the high-volume opportunities, there is no doubt in my mind its an IP play. There is no way you can hit the cost and battery power requirements with discrete graphics," said Trevett.

SK Telecom said it will work with the Khronos Group to establish a market for OpenGL ES systems. "We have selected OpenGL ES as our standard graphics API for 3D handheld applications," Won Hee Sull, vice president of the carrier's platform R&D center, said in a statement.

Software developer Hi Corp. already supplies some Korean phone makers with a software 3D graphics engine called Mascot and expects to migrate its proprietary API to OpenGL ES soon.

OpenGL ES is expected to work in tandem with higher level Java software APIs now in the works, including JSR 184, a Java 3D graphics API in development by the Java Community Process.

Nokia recently kicked off the latest Java graphics standard, JSR 226 which aims to bring the Worldwide Web Consortium's Scalable Vector Graphics Tiny subset to mobile Java systems.SVG Tiny is an XML-based 2D graphics language aimed at helping create high-quality text, maps and scalable icons. The JSR 226 group, which includes Motorola, Symbian and Texas Instruments, aims to finish its work by June 2004.

The Khronos Group plans to support SVG Tiny graphics in its OpenGL ES 1.1 spec due by July 2004, said Trevett. That version of the spec will also enable multitextured graphics.

Existing chipmakers in the Khronos group include ARM, TI and ATI Technologies.

By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved