Sigma Designs Aims DVD Chips At Consumer Apps
Sep 21, 1999 (Tech Web - CMP via COMTEX) -- Sigma Designs, a vendor of
DVD playback chips for PCs, is shifting gears to attack the embedded
consumer electronics market. The company is launching a DVD decoder
chip aimed at hometheater, Web DVD boxes, and in-car players.
The company's EM8400 integrates a proprietary 80-mips RISC core,
program stream demultiplexer, MPEG-2 and AC-3 decoding, content
scrambling system (CSS) decryption, display controller, and NTSC/PAL TV
encoding in a single chip.
The EM8400 required a major silicon redesign by Sigma Design engineers,
who had to add hardware blocks for such functions as audio decoding and
program stream demultiplexing to the company's existing silicon. Those
functions had been left for a host PC to process in software in Sigma
Design's previous REALmagic chip for PC-based DVD playback.
While the market already has plenty of chip solutions for
straightforward DVD players, the EM8400 is set apart by its multimarket
approach.
Leveraging its relationships with Microsoft and Intel, Sigma Design
holds high hopes for driving the chip -- tightly combined with software
support -- into a variety of Windows CE-based consumer systems ranging
from Microsoft TV set-tops, the Microsoft-led Venus project in China,
and the Intel-initiated Auto PC. However, the company is not solely
committed to WinCE solutions. It is also adding software driver support
to other embedded operating systems, including those of QNX and
VxWorks.
Further, while the EM8400-based system solution is initially designed
for combo DVD players using an X86 CPU, Sigma Design plans to add
support for MIPS, ARM, and Hitachi SH processors in the first quarter
of 2000, said William Wong, the company's vice president of marketing.
The EM8400 is designed to cover all bases for a variety of DVD
applications. The company said the device is good for portable DVD
players as well as high-end home theater systems, where it is said to
handle progressive DVD playback.
Power dissipation is 1 watt, and a sleep-mode power management feature
suits the chip for portable applications, Sigma said.
"Consumer electronics companies interested in launching a home theater
DVD player capable of displaying progressive video can now do so
without adding a line doubler chip to their DVD players," Wong said.
Since the EM8400 integrates a video scalar with bilinear interpolation,
the source recorded on a DVD can be displayed not only in native
720x480-pixel interlaced (i) video, but also in 720x480 progressive
(p), or be up-converted to HDTV resolutions such as 720p, 960p, and 1,
080i.
The chip supports DVD, VCD, as well as China's SVCD standard, while the
on-chip audio decoder supports Dolby Digital, DTS, and the high-end
DVD-Audio format newly standardized by the DVD Forum. It doesn't handle
the Super Audio CD system developed by Philips and Sony, however.
Fabricated at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. using a
0.25-micron CMOS process, the EM8400 is capable of 8-bit on-screen
display, subpicture, and 4-bit alpha blending.
Evaluation samples will be available in late October, with mass
production slated for the fourth quarter. The price is $39 each in lots
of 1,000.
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Copyright (C) 1999 CMP Media Inc.
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