Sigma Designs rolls DVD silicon aimed at embedded consumer apps
Junko Yoshida
09/27/1999
Electronic Engineering Times
Page 54
Copyright 1999 CMP Publications Inc.
MILPITAS, CALIF. - Sigma Designs Inc., a vendor of DVD playback chips for the PC, is shifting gears to attack the embedded consumer electronics market. The company is launching a DVD decoder chip aimed at home theater, Web DVD boxes and in-car players.
The EM8400 integrates a proprietary 80-Mips RISC core, program stream demux, MPEG -2 and AC-3 decoding, content scrambling system (CSS) decryption, display controller and NTSC/PAL TV encoding in a single chip.
The EM8400 meant a major silicon redesign for Sigma Designs engineers, who had to add to the company's existing silicon such functions as audio decoding and program stream demultiplexing in hardware blocks. Those functions were left for a host PC to process in software in Sigma Designs' previous REALmagic chip for PC-based DVD playback.
While the market already has plenty of chip solutions for straightforward DVD players, what sets the EM8400 apart is its multimarket approach.
Leveraging its relationships with Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp., Sigma Designs holds high hopes for driving the new 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. The company, however, is not committed to WinCE solutions alone. It is also adding software driver support to other embedded operating systems, including QNX and VxWorks.
CPU support widening
Also, while the EM8400-based system solution is initially designed for combo DVD players using an X86 CPU, Sigma Designs plans to add support for MIPS, ARM and Hitachi SH processors in the first quarter of 2000, said William Wong, vice president of marketing.
The EM8400 is designed to cover all bases for various DVD applications. The company claims 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 W, and sleep-mode power management works for portable apps.
"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," said Wong. Since the EM8400 integrates a video scalar with bilinear interpolation, the source recorded on a DVD can be displayed not only in native 720 x 480-pixel interlaced (i) video, but also in 720 x 480 progressive (p), or be upconverted to HDTV resolutions such as 1,080i.
Evaluation samples will be available in late October, with mass production slated for the fourth quarter. The price is $39 per piece in lots of 1,000.
September 27, 1999
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