Vivante Corporation is a

fabless Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing their fabrication (or ''fab'') to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry. These foundries are typically, but not exclus ...

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material which has an electrical resistivity and conductivity, electrical conductivity value falling between that of a electrical conductor, conductor, such as copper, and an insulator (electricity), insulator, such as glas ...

company headquartered in

Sunnyvale, California Sunnyvale () is a city located in the Santa Clara Valley in northwest Santa Clara County in the U.S. state of California. Sunnyvale lies along the historic El Camino Real and Highway 101 and is bordered by portions of San Jose to the nort ...

, with an R&D center in

Shanghai, China Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flowin ...

. The company was founded in 2004 as GiQuila and focused on the portable

gaming Gaming may refer to: Games and sports The act of playing games, as in: * Legalized gambling, playing games of chance for money, often referred to in law as "gaming" * Playing a role-playing game, in which players assume fictional roles * Playin ...

market. The company's first product was a

DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...

-compatible

graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

(GPU) capable of playing PC games. In 2007, GiQuila changed its name to Vivante and changed the direction of the company to focus on the design and licensing of embedded

designs. The company is licensing its Mobile Visual Reality to semiconductor solution providers that serve embedded computing markets for mobile gaming, high-definition home entertainment, image processing, and automotive display and entertainment. Vivante is named as a contributor to the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation. In 2015, VeriSilicon Holdings Co., Ltd. acquired Vivante Corporation in an all-stock transaction.

Products

Since changing directions Vivante has developed a range of GPU cores that are compliant with the

OpenGL ES OpenGL for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES or GLES) is a subset of the OpenGL computer graphics rendering application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics such as those used by video games, typically hardware-accel ...

1.1 and 2.0 standards as well as the

OpenVG OpenVG is an API designed for hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics. Its primary platforms are mobile phones, gaming & media consoles and consumer electronic devices. It was designed to help manufacturers create more attractive user interfaces ...

standard. Created by VeriSilicon support for the

Vulkan API Vulkan is a low- overhead, cross-platform API, open standard for 3D graphics and computing. Vulkan targets high-performance real-time 3D graphics applications, such as video games and interactive media. Vulkan is intended to offer higher perform ...

1.0 and for

OpenVX OpenVX is an open, royalty-free standard for cross platform acceleration of computer vision applications. It is designed by the Khronos Group to facilitate portable, optimized and power-efficient processing of methods for vision algorithms. This i ...

1.0 is provided for at least 6 major desktop and embedded operating systems. 2D graphics products & Vector GPUs, summarized by the vendor under the term "Composition Processing Cores" (CPC), sometimes mentioned with the feature of single pass composition blending capability of 8 or higher, are the GC300, GC320, GC350 and GP355 (OpenVG core)with the additional listing of GC200 and GC420. NXP further mentions GC255 in a presentation for their i.MX models. The NXP i.MX8 series will come with 2 units of the GC7000Lite or GC7000 vector processor. For 3D graphics products please see the table below. Legend for the notes in below listing: * ''Pipelined FP/INT double (64-bit), single/high (32-bit) and half precision/medium (16-bit) precision IEEE formats for GPU Compute and HDR graphics'', Source:

Adoption

They have announced that as of 2009 they have at least fifteen licensees who have used their GPUs in twenty embedded designs. Application processors using Vivante GPU technology: * Marvell ARMADA range of SoCs * NXP / Freescale i.MX Series *

Ingenic Semiconductor Ingenic Semiconductor is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company based in Beijing, China founded in 2005. They purchased licenses for the MIPS architecture instruction sets in 2009 and design CPU-microarchitectures based on them. They also design ...

Jz4770 * ICT Godson-2H * Rockchip RK2918 *

Actions Semiconductor Actions Semiconductor Co. Ltd. () is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company founded in 2000 and headquartered in Zhuhai, Guangdong province. The company has about 600 employees and designs SoCs for tablets, digital audio players, photo viewers ...

ATM7029 *

HiSilicon HiSilicon () is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company based in Shenzhen, Guangdong and wholly owned by Huawei. HiSilicon purchases licenses for CPU designs from ARM Holdings, including the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore, ARM Cortex-M3, ARM Cortex-A7 M ...

K3V2 *

InfoTM InfoTM is a Chinese technology company that was founded in 2008 as InfoTM Microelectronics Co., Ltd. Application processors References External links InfoTM company website ARM architecture Embedded microprocessors System on a chip ...

iMAP×210

GC8000 Series

After Vivante was sold to VeriSilicon the Arcturus GC8000 series was released by VeriSilicon, which supports newer technologies such as OpenCL 3.0, OpenVX 1.2, OpenVG 1.1, OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenGL 4.0 and Vulkan 1.1.

Linux support

There are no plans on writing a new

DRM DRM may refer to: Government, military and politics * Defense reform movement, U.S. campaign inspired by Col. John Boyd * Democratic Republic of Madagascar, a former socialist state (1975–1992) on Madagascar * Direction du renseignement milita ...

KMS driver The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) is a subsystem of the Linux kernel responsible for interfacing with GPUs of modern video cards. DRM exposes an API that user-space programs can use to send commands and data to the GPU and perform operations su ...

kernel driver for the Vivante hardware, since Vivante previously put out their Linux kernel component under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

(GPL), instead of maintaining it as a proprietary blob. The free

Gallium3D Mesa, also called Mesa3D and The Mesa 3D Graphics Library, is an open source implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, and other graphics API specifications. Mesa translates these specifications to vendor-specific graphics hardware drivers. Its most ...

-style device driver etna_viv has surpassed Vivante's own proprietary user-space driver in some benchmarks. It supports Vivante's product line of GC400 Series, GC800 Series, GC1000 Series, GC2000 Series, GC3000 Series, GC4000 Series, and GC7000lite.

References

External links