HiSilicon is a company that we have not seen at IBC before. The company has been making a lot more noise recently and we visited after spotting that it had become a Dolby Vision partner for its STB SoCs. The firm is owned by Huawei and has developed from a focus on video surveillance chips. It claims to be #1 in the market for ip cameras, where it has more than 10 years experience and has an “end to end” HEVC-based solution and it can capture, encode and decode in real time.
The company tries to focus on the “value added” end of the market and was showing 4K 60P content running using the VP9 codec. The new SoC will be sampling at the end of 2015. HiSilicon is a fabless company and works with TSMC and SMIC (Shanghai). 28nm processes are used for its chips.
The company started shipping TV chipsets in 2014 and has had design wins with Hisense, Konka, Sharp (China), Skyworth and TPV, especially in 4K TV in the Chinese market. The company told us that it is shipping a million TV chips per month in China. Its target in 2016 is to get more penetration in overseas markets, hence the booth at IBC.
