MediaTek has announced the MT2523 series of chips for wearables, smart home applications and the MT8581 SoC for UltraHD Blu-ray players.
The MT2523 is claimed to be the first system-in-package (SiP) to offer GPS, dual-mode Bluetooth Low Energy, and a MIPI-supported high-resolution mobile screen. The higher level of integration enables a PCB area that is claimed to be 41% smaller than competitors. The battery life is also said to be a week. The chip is based around an ARM Cortex M4. The display component supports MIPI-DSI and serial interfaces, resulting in a high-resolution mobile screen. It includes 2D capabilities of true colour, per pixel alpha channel and anti-aliasing fonts, plus 1-bit index colour to save memory and computing power. The chip will be available in the first half of 2016.
The MT8581 will support Blu-ray players with UltraHD and HDR. It can also support CD and DVD playback as well as BD-Live and BonusView. The chip supports up and down scaling and features HEVC, H.264 and VP9 4K 60p video decoder for 4K (3840×2160) video content and also MPEG-2, VP8 and VC-1 2K 60p video decoder for legacy 2K (1920×1080 video content). For audio decoding, it has capabilities for Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS, and DTS-HD master audio, via multi-format decoding. The chip is said to be the only dedicated BD chip and is made using 28nm technology.
Mass production is set for the second half of 2016.
Analyst Comment
We tried to catch up with Mediatek at CES to check the details of the HDR support, but the press people left early, and nobody would talk to us without their supervision. However, Dolby and Mediatek have said they will work together, so we can reasonably assume that this chip will support Dolby Vision and also HDR10, which is relatively simple. Mediatek was not among companies that were recently listed by Technicolor as supporters of its technology, although MStar was listed. We’d be surprised if it couldn’t also support the other initiatives. We’ll try to get more information. (BR)
