Sigma Designs, Inc. today announced that it will demonstrate a new advanced DVD player reference design at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. This new design will be demonstrated in Sigma’s suite at the Venetian Hotel (No. 29-136).

Sigma’s new progressive DVD player reference design is a very low-cost solution for producing a complete, standalone DVD player for both traditional interlaced TV output as well as progressive scan output for HDTVs and projectors. The design can be manufactured for the same cost as most standalone DVD players sold today, making progressive DVD a “no brainer” upgrade. When used on an HDTV set, the progressive DVD feature results in twice the video resolution and the complete elimination of interlace artifacts. The improvement in picture quality can easily be discerned by the average consumer. Consumers and retailers are quickly realizing that progressive DVD players are “have-to-have“” accessories for consumers purchasing HDTVs.

Virtually all MPEG decoder chips designed for today’s DVD players were engineered to decode at an interlaced 480i rate. Sigma’s REALmagic® EM8300 and EM8400 decoders, by comparison, were designed especially for progressive 480p decoding and display. This feature alone makes Sigma’s DVD playback silicon the favored solution for DVD players in the PC industry, where non-interlaced VGA screens are the norm. Other on-chip features, such as 8-tap scaling and frame rate conversion, are essential features for matching DVD’s 480p resolution to the precise resolution and frame rate of the HDTV display.