A video intercom terminal which can reduce the cost as well as the complexity of such a system is introduced in this paper.By employing a multimedia SOC Z228 which contains a multi-media processing unit MPEG-4 codec and a control unit known as ARM core as its central unit

the terminal also has many peripheral interfaces and controllers often used

such as the LCD controller

the camera Sensor interface and the audio data bus interface.The experiment result shows that the terminal can acquire the video data and then code or decode it according to the MPEG-4 standard within a single chip and it can be used to communicate visually at a speed of 30 frames per second under the resolution of 640 times 480 via VGA.