Sigma Designs had a meeting room and welcomed us with news of its SMP8758 SoC which supports UltraHD and HEVC. The chip supports up to the Main-10 profile that forms part of UltraHD Phase 1 and includes HDCP2.2 for copy protection. The chip includes a dual core Arm Cortex A9CPU and quad core GPU. Linux and Android, HTML-5 and OpenGLES 2.0 are all supported.
Sigma also has low cost SoCs and these are used in the DuneHD dongle and also by Novabase and Zapperbox.
We also talked to Sigma about the G.Hn technology, which offers a standardised way to arbitrate and optimise between powerline and WiFi technologies. We had been impressed with the logic of why G.Hn seemed to make sense, but had been frustrated by the lack of retail products. Sigma told us that once major service providers roll the technology out, retail products will start to appear.
