Sigma Designs today announced it will work with Pioneer on the joint development of a full-featured Blu-ray DVD player using Sigma Designs' SMP8630 family of media processors. "Collaborating with Pioneer on an industry-first product was a natural relationship for Sigma," said Ken Lowe, vice president of strategic marketing, Sigma Designs. "Sigma is dedicated to creating the leading chipset for next-generation, high-definition optical players and we are excited to be working with such a respected consumer electronics company."

Sigma's SMP8634 system-on-chip (SOC) solution supports decoding of H.264 (MPEG-4 part 10), Windows Media Video 9 (Microsoft's implementation of VC-1, the proposed SMPTE standard), MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (part 2) with multiple streams, up to the equivalent of two high-definition video streams.

Graphics acceleration, multistandard audio decoding, display processing capabilities, and HDMI/HDCP output round out its multimedia core. Content security is ensured through a dedicated secure processor, flash memory, and a range of digital rights management (DRM) engines for high-speed payload decryption. The SMP8634's 300-MIPS host CPU, 3.2 GB/second unified memory controller, Ethernet 10/100 controller, dual USB 2.0 controller, and IDE controller provide for a single-chip solution for most set-top boxes and consumer players.

Pioneer plans to introduce the new Blu-ray DVD player in the first half of 2006.