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MILPITAS, CALIF. - Sigma Designs Inc., a vendor of DVD playback chips for the PC, is shifting gears to attack the embedded consumer electronics market. The company is launching a DVD decoder chip aimed at home theater, Web DVD boxes and in-car players.
The EM8400 integrates a proprietary 80-Mips RISC core, program stream demux, MPEG 2 and AC-3 decoding, content scrambling system (CSS) decryption, display controller and NTSC/PAL TV encoding in a single chip.
The EM8400 meant a major silicon redesign for Sigma Designs engineers, who had to add to the company's existing silicon such functions as audio decoding and program stream demultiplexing in hardware blocks....