IBC was a show for no shows. Not only did Edgeware tell us that Seachange International had not turned up, after all, in the Flash Memory VoD module market, but Sigma also told us that Broadcom had yet to show up in the Mediaroom market, with a chip that could support a Mediaroom set top.
Broadcom announced its market entry in January 2008 at CES when both Microsoft and Broadcom said that they would work together to port the Mediaroom IPTV client software onto its BCM7405 system on a chip (SOC). Sigma and ST Micro were the two partners of choice for Mediaroom in its early days with Microsoft saying, we have two partners, let’s get it right with them before opening out the eco-system to others. So Sigma and ST have a 4 year head start in this market and are focused on keeping it.
Broadcom was supposed to have a piece of the 2nd generation set tops in AT&T’s U-Verse TV which is perhaps the highest profile Mediaroom deployment in the world, but according to Sigma it failed to ship in January and still has not shipped.
If that non-arrival is true, then that long term failure raises doubts about Broadcom’s invincibility, for instance, will it find its one year old promise to enter the MoCA market any easier to hold onto? It has two certified reference designs in MoCA, one for its SoC design announced in January this year, but has followed up with no design wins, while rival Entropic says it is almost ready with MoCA 2.0 silicon.
How would Sigma, mostly a DVD player and set top chip maker, know that Broadcom is inactive in the MoCA market? Well it has acquired the core chip supplier to the rival technology HomePNA in Coppergate and its main focus at the show was to talk about its entry into the HomePlug market. In buying Coppergate, Sigma continues to pick out the same markets that Broadcom is targeting. In entering the HomePlug market it is also taking on Intellon, the leading chip maker in HomePlug, which has been acquired by the other major WiFi chip specialist, Atheros. Two more aggressive chip competitors we can’t imagine going after.
Sigma’s main stand demonstration was a MIMO system for HomePlug which it calls ClearPath. This looks like Sigma’s stab at the next generation specification for Homeplug AV2, which we found out in August will specify gigabit class data delivery at the PHY level delivering perhaps 600 Mbps in real terms and is supposed to be delivered at the same time as MoCA 2.0 late this year using MIMO, a new transmission coding scheme and a more efficient MAC.
So perhaps Sigma here is trying to lead the debate on MIMO in some way. The system works by sending signals along all three of the cables in a home power system, the neutral, earth and live power line. It then collates those signals to deliver improved throughput. Once the new standard is out it looks like Sigma will be in a position to jump straight on it with a product.
The demonstration was simple enough, show an existing HomePlug scheme, load the circuit with appliances and see the performance drop from 85 Mbps to perhaps 40 Mbps. Then swap the circuit for one using Sigma’s Clearpath and see how the throughput remains constant at around 90 Mbps.
Sigma also showed its own new Mediaroom second generation SMP8652 set top and its own low power RVU remote user interface for set top boxes. This is a combination of a new Remote User Interface protocol out of DLNA which, when used with the DLNA core function allows home gateways or master set tops to send commercial video content to cheap secondary set tops, using DLNA’s DTCP-IP link protection, instead of adding a further conditional access node.
Sigma’s CopperGate has always been expected to play in the G.hn market, and Sigma told us to watch out for an entry that would support G.hn relaying, where one node can pass on data to another, even to one out of reach in a kind of mesh format and to deliver multicast packets over G.hn. Spanish powerline chip vendor DS2 which has just been bought by Marvell has been a long supporter of the relaying feature, and is the other core contributor to the G.hn standard with Coppergate.