Press Release

RMI Announces Home Media Player Solution at IBC 2008 Extending Advanced Features and Capabilities to the Digital Photo Frame Market

RMI’s turnkey HMP Solution drives video streaming, wireless connectivity and increased on-demand content enhancing the consumer experience at home

IBC2008 CONFERENCE, Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Cupertino, Calif. – Sept. 13, 2008 — RMI Corporation, a leading provider of High Performance Processors for Communication and Media, today announce a complete product solution for Home Media Players™ (HMP), extending new features and capabilities to the Digital Photo Frame market. RMI’s turnkey HMP™ application solution drives advanced product capabilities such as video streaming, wireless connectivity, increased on-demand content, home connectivity and enhancing the overall consumer experience.

RMI’s Alchemy-based™ Home Media Player Solution offers original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) a faster time to market, lower system cost, and the configurability and performance required to develop market-leading Home Media Players with advanced features. The RMI® solution leverages the power-optimized RMI Alchemy™ Au1200™ series of connected media processors, giving OEMs and original design manufacturers (ODMs) the flexibility and the tools necessary to develop and deliver a complete high performance, connected HMP system for not only consumer usage but overall home connectivity.

“Our HMP initiative extends the product features that our customers are implementing today for next generation consumer devices. The added functionality that RMI brings with the 700MHz Au1250 Processor creates a new category of products that extends way beyond the standard digital photo frame. The HMP solution brings home connectivity, wireless networking, internet access and streaming video to make this a truly significant product in the home networking and consumer market,” said Behrooz Abdi, president and chief executive officer, RMI.

The evolution of the traditional Digital Photo Frame (DPF) into the Home Media Player (HMP) has already begun with the addition of Wi-Fi® connectivity to the DPF category. The RMI Alchemy HMP design integrates Atheros’ Radio-on-Chip for Mobile (ROC®) AR6002 for WLAN. This single-chip solution delivers the industry’s highest throughput and lowest power consumption for embedded Wi-Fi applications, providing designers with the ideal wireless technology to enable a new generation of advanced digital photo frame products.

“For today’s multi-functional digital photo frames to offer significantly expanded capabilities beyond displaying family photos, they require high-performance wireless connectivity to the Internet,” said Sam Endy, vice president and general manager of the mobile wireless business unit for Atheros. “The reliability and low-power benefits of Atheros’ AR6002 enables an entirely new class of mini Web tablets and smart viewing displays for sharing multimedia in the home.”

With the combination of internet connectivity and RMI Alchemy media processors, the following features are now possible:

• Streaming IP radio, DVD-quality video, and IPTV from popular websites like YouTube™, Hulu™, and Joost™
• VoIP and video chat calls
• Gadget and widget services for on-demand content such as weather, sports, news, traffic, finance, and more
• Interface to social networking sites (Web 2.0)
• Online photo and video sharing from popular content sharing sites
• Email/Instant messaging/SMS/MMS/RSS reader
• TV reception
• Pier-to-pier (frame-to-frame) content sharing and communication

Complete HMP Application Solution
RMI’s Home Media Player Reference Design Kit is a customizable solution including a reference design board, software board support package (BSP), hardware schematics, documentation, and advanced HMP applications. The HMP Reference Design Board is based on the RMI Alchemy Au1250™ Processor. This high performance processor, running at 700MHz, provides the needed horsepower to handle the most challenging HMP applications. The reference design includes all essential hardware functionality including media card interfaces for SD/MMC/MS/xD/CF and a USB flash stick. Additionally, the design also comprehends an audio codec for stereo speakers, a touch screen interface, and robust Wi-Fi connectivity provided by Atheros’ AR6002 ROCm WLAN chip. Flash memory and DDR2 RAM are plentiful for both the user (media storage) and the application space.

The HMP Reference Design Kit includes a complete board support package (BSP). The BSP includes the kernel, file system, and tool chain, along with driver support for all peripherals. In addition, the BSP includes a complete media stack for high quality D1 resolution video playback of the internet’s most popular audio and video formats including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV, DivX, and Xvid.  RMI has also established a broad ecosystem of partnerships to enable OEMs to quickly take their HMP vision to market. This ecosystem includes both ODMs as well as Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) with a range of capabilities and solutions well suited for the HMP and related consumer media markets.

About RMI Corporation
RMI Corporation is a fabless semiconductor company providing High-Performance Super System-on-a-Chip (SuperSoC™) Processor solutions for the Infrastructure, Enterprise, and Consumer Media markets. Applications include Wireless, Networking Security, Thin Clients, and Connected Multi-Media. RMI offers a broad platform of advanced MIPS-compatible processor solutions with both 32/64-bit architectures supporting frequencies from 300MHz to 1.2 GHz. RMI is headquartered in Cupertino, CA with branch and subsidiary operations in Texas, United Kingdom, France, India, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China. More information about RMI can be found on the company's website at http://www.RMICorp.com.

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Media Contact - RMI
D. Christopher Keil                       
Sr. Director, Marketing                
RMI Corporation
408-434-5700
ckeil@RMICorp.com

©Copyright 2008 RMI Corporation. All rights reserved. RMI, the RMI logo, RMI Alchemy, Alchemy-Based, Home Media Player, HMP, Alchemy, Au1250, SuperSOC and the other trademarks named on the RMI website are trademarks of RMI Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.