Electronic News, Sept. 27, 1999
SIGMA ENTERS CONSUMER STB MARKET
by Peter Brown
San Jose--Sigma Designs, Inc. Milpitas, Calif., has made a strategic decision to enter the consumer set-top box (STB) market using its REALmagic MPEG core technology.
This will be the first consumer effort for Sigma Designs, which has traditionally played in the PC market targeting DVD-ROM and MPEG video streams applications. With the EM8400 chip, the company will enter the consumer market where competition continues to grow each week.
"Just like Intel, we are looking to consumer applications because we want to expand our revenues past the PC space," said William K. Wong, vice president of marketing at Sigma Designs.
The chip is based on a 0.25-micron process technology and will yield a 2.5-volt power usage, making it good for portable DVD applications, Wong said. In addition to MPEG-2 video decoding, the chip features a 80MIPS RISC core, AC-3 audio decoder, hardware CSS and DVD encryption and glueless connections to PCI, VMI or VIP interfaces. In addition, the EM8400 has an integrated display controller for 8-bit and subpicture blending. The EM8400 is available now at $39 in 1,000 unit quantities.
Applications that Sigma Designs is targeting range from full-featured DVD players to handheld DVD applications. The company wants to be designed into interactive televisions, video-on-demand boxes, and STBs utilizing Windows CE.
The chip already is being used in the Automobile PC being developed by Intel Corp., Santa Clara, Calif.; the Microsoft TV; and the Venus Project, which is a DVD STB for China. All three of these boxes will use Windows CE and the EM8400 chip, said Alex Chow, product manager for the EM8400.
The chip also is designed into the Boca Vision ST2001 Internet/information appliance that will use the MediaGX CPU from National Semiconductor Inc., San Jose.
"We are going after the convergence box and larger set-top box market that is targeted toward the internet and DVD features," Wong said. "Fortunately for us, these are PC features where we have been playing and have been successful for years now."
(I could find no electronic link to this article, so I typed it in verbatim. Excuse the typos) |
