ARM buys securable display controller

ARM has agreed to buy from Cadence Design Systems the display controller intellectual property (IP) cores developed by recent acquisition Evatronix.

The PANTA family of display controllers was designed to work closely with the ARM processors and was, at its launch, claimed to be the only licensable display controller that could be controlled by secure signals provided by an ARM Trustzone-enabled processor – primarily to protect video content from capture or unauthorized transformations.

Evatronix designed the PANTA to offload the host processor in a mobile phone or tablet from 2D graphics video processing tasks such as color-space conversion, alpha-blending and gamma correction.

“Display technology is critical to the mobile consumer’s user experience,” said Pete Hutton, executive vice president and general manager of ARM’s media-processing division. “The addition of the PANTA family of display cores to the ARM product portfolio will help our ecosystem of partners get to market quickly with high-end displays that are fully integrated with ARM’s leading Mali graphics and video solutions and protected with ARM TrustZone security.”