Imagination Blog

On Monday 27th July 1992, John Major had just become British Prime Minister, and Linux was a word yet to enter our vocabulary. Classic FM didn’t even exist. And VideoLogic, a small technology company in England, began a project that would later become known as PowerVR — based on the first consumer deferred renderer. Yes, believe it or not, Imagination’s … Continued

It’s hard to believe but Imagination’s PowerVR technology has achieved its silver anniversary – 25 years of leading graphics technology. To celebrate, we take a look back with a brief history of where PowerVR came from and how we got to where we are today. In the 1990s, graphics technology entered a period of explosive innovation and growth. Around that … Continued

Imagination Technologies is a company with a vision to help our customers create innovative products that will change the world. We are always thinking ahead to see how we can best deliver that future – a future that’s bright, bold and empowering. At the core of this vision are our employees who are key in bringing this future to fruition … Continued

Imagination Technologies is a company with a vision to help our customers create innovative products that will change the world. We are always thinking ahead to see how we can best deliver that future – a future that’s bright, bold and empowering. At the core of this vision are our employees who are key in bringing this future to fruition … Continued

Over the past few years, everybody has become familiar with the phrase Internet of Things (IoT) and the world has been told to expect big things from this market. However, the growth of the IoT market has up to now been not been as fast as many had predicted, particularly in the ‘smart home’ arena. A number of things have … Continued

Over the past few days in the UK government broke the news that from 2040 new petrol or diesel powered vehicles would be banned. It’s a bold move that indicates that our shiny new cleaner energy future is not just going to remain on the horizon forever; we’re actually going to get there, even if it takes legislation to get … Continued

Many students of computer architecture study it at the theoretical level of data paths, control structures, and memory systems. But how these all fit together is often left to the imagination. The MIPSfpga course changes that. The MIPSfpga is the first unobfuscated, commercial softcore CPU that has been made available to all academics. With MIPSfpga, users can explore computer architecture … Continued

I don’t think many would disagree that the key technology trend of the 21st century so far has been the advent of mobile. However today I think we are on the verge of a huge shift towards another driving paradigm – smartness. Mobile has had huge social benefits – from connecting us to help and community, to enabling access to … Continued

As is well known, one of the pillars on which the success of the IoT rests is its requirement for a multitude of devices to be connected to the rest of the world via the internet. As such, it’s safe to assume that wireless communication will be the backbone that underpins this. The question is which technology is most suitable? … Continued

We’ve all come to rely on using GPS to track and direct us when we’re outside in our cars and bikes, but when we get inside a large indoor location, such as an airport, or a conference hall, we’re still, on the whole, having to rely on paper maps. To move us all on, the Wi-Fi Alliance has announced an … Continued

The other day one of my colleagues at Imagination pulled from her pocket an old, battered, but clearly much cherished, music player. I couldn’t help but comment on its age, but she was proud to still be using it and that the music contained on it was six years old! Retro, is the new cutting edge – you heard it … Continued

Smart home gateways reinvented for the IoT generation Monday, 12th June 1837 is a significant date in the telecommunications industry. On that day William Fothergill Cooke, along with Charles Wheatstone, a professor at King’s College London, were granted a patent for an invention that would ultimately become the basis for all digital wired communications. They invented the electric telegraph. Following … Continued

The future: it’s not what it was. When I was young in the 1980s, the technology depicted in TV shows and movies seemed fantastically futuristic. What’s remarkable, and arguably slightly disconcerting, is how much of it is becoming a reality. No, we can’t yet beam-up anywhere, but Star Trek’s communicator has long since become an everyday object to billions of … Continued

Linux has become the general purpose operating system of choice for embedded systems and is almost always supported for high-end SoCs developed by the semiconductor vendors. Most vendors use the open source Linux distribution, then build a custom distribution representing the device tree supported for the specific SoC, and include the necessary drivers for the peripherals on the SoC, as … Continued

This blog post introduces GRLAA (GRadient Line Anti-Aliasing), a relatively simple and efficient method designed to cope with aliased lines, which can often crop up in automotive navigation applications. In the discipline of signal processing, there is a specific sampling frequency called the Nyquist frequency. When sampling a signal at a frequency lower than the Nyquist frequency, the signal reconstructed … Continued