Sigma Designs' SMP8654 Selected by Celrun for Korean IPTV Deployment

System-on-chip (SoC) specialist, Sigma Designs, announced Wednesday that its SMP8654 media processors will be used to power the TD-1100 set-top box from Korean IPTV technology provider, Celrun, which Korean telecom provider, LG Dacom, plans to use for a nationwide IPTV service. Sigma says that its chips have now been integrated into the TD-1100, where they will support real-time IPTV streaming, along with VOD services. "Our selection by LG Dacom to be deployed across Korea was largely due to Sigma's next-generation system-on-chip, SMP8654, as LG Dacom demanded set-top boxes that are robust and offer technology advanced enough to scale for all IPTV customers in Korea," Celrun CEO, Young Min Kim, said in a prepared statement. "As a longtime partner with Sigma Designs, the company continues to meet our needs in terms of best performance and cost--we look forward to our continued work together."

According to Celrun, the TD-1100 supports multicasting, VOD and DRM, and delivers multi-task performance by processing multiple streams of content in tandem at speeds up to 20Mbps. Sigma, meanwhile, claims that the SMP8654 provides a "50% increase in overall performance" and can reduce sub-system costs by around 30%, compared to its predecessor, the SMP8634. According to the company, the SMP8654 offers a full complement of advanced decoder engines with HD video encoding, including H.264 (MPEG-4 part 10), Windows Media Video 9, VC-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (part 2), and the new AVS standard. Its multimedia core also includes high-performance graphics acceleration, multi-standard audio decoding, advanced display processing capabilities and HDMI 1.3 output, the company says. Content security is provided via a dedicated secure processor, on-chip flash memory and various DRM engines for high-speed payload decryption. It also features various system peripherals, including a dual Gigabit Ethernet controller, a dual USB 2.0 controller, a NAND flash controller, and IR controller and a SATA controller.