Sigma Designs Unveils G.hn-Compliant Home Networking Chipset

Sigma Designs will ship a new home networking chipset in 2011 combining new and current standards for sending data over coaxial cable, telephone and power lines as it seeks the upper hand in developing ICs for the new ITU G.hn standard.

The CG5110, developed using technology that Sigma Designs acquired in buying Coppergate, was unveiled Monday and will start sampling by year-end. The chipset, the digital portion of which will be built using a 40-nanometer process, supports four wired home networking standards and is among the first available to support G.hn. G.hn covers transmission of high speed data over coax, telephone and phone lines.

The chipset is compatible with the HomePlug AV standard set by the HomePlug Powerline Alliance and complies with one of the two IEEE 1901 standards. It also was developed not to interfere with the other IEEE 1901 standard, Panasonic HD PLC, and is compatible with the Home Powerline Network Association (HPNA) that sets standards for data transmitted over coax and telephone lines.

"The difference in the standards is not so large that you are duplicating the chips,” said Michael Weissman, Sigma vice president of corporate marketing. While the coding scheme for forward correction error are different, it adds “a couple pennies to the die size” to support the various formats, he said. In having a chipset compatible with G.hn and HomePlug AV, Sigma gains access to a base of 30 to 40 IPTV service providers in Europe that have already deployed HomePlug AV in set-top boxes. It also gains a ready customer in AT&T U-verse, which was Coppergate’s largest North American customer for HomePlug AV.

The digital portion of the chipset is expected to be built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., which makes other Sigma chips and will combine it with a 130-nanometer analog front end, industry analysts said. Weissman declined to comment. The chip is expected to start sampling with customers in the first half of 2011, start volume in the second half and be deployed in the first bridge products by late 2011, Weissman said. The first standalone AV products containing the chipset are expected to ship in 2012, with a volume market for the technology to emerge the following year. In bridge devices, the retail price might be triple the bill-of-materials cost, Weissman said. In an embedded product that could shrink to $40 to $60 above the retail price, he said.

Sigma developed CG5110 with an eye toward combining it with the media processors that the company already deploys in Blu-ray players, TVs, front projectors and other products, Weissman said.

"We saw the benefit of an integrated solution since the day we signed the term sheet” to acquire Coppergate, and “we have been working on how do we best leverage these technologies in board and reference designs,” Weissman said. “That clearly was a criteria of the acquisition. It makes a lot of sense to integrate G.hn with our media processors, because you can eliminate a lot of the board and shared memory cost and the tools would be a lot less."

With the combination of the wired technologies, consumers will get the option of setting up their own network, a move that could save carriers up to $400 in installation costs, Weissman said. The chipsets support one media type at a time, shifting to the slowest speed on a link with multiple standards, he said.

In developing the chipset, Sigma also crafted ClearPath technology that uses phase, neutral and ground lines of a powerline as independent channels that avoid noise and attenuation, Weissman said. Sigma Designs claims to have achieved 30 Mbps throughput in the most troublesome of home against 10 percent for other HomePlug AV chips. Under optimum conditions, it matched many of its competitors at 80 Mbps. Competitor Atheros is claiming its chips get 230 Mbps throughput under the best conditions. The new G.hn spec is said to have a 70 percent efficiency in terms of delivering optimum performance versus 55 percent for HomePlug and 57 for Multimedia over Coax (MoCA).

While Sigma is betting on G.hn to eventually replace other wired standards, it isn’t expected to fully dislodge HomePlug AV or other competitors for five to 10 years, Weissman said. Starting with the CG5110 appearing in bridges “is always a good idea when a new technology comes out so that if it has a defect, it’s a lot cheaper to replace,” he said. When AT&T started to deploy HomePNA technology, it was in bridges for six months before moving into STBs, Weissman said.

Several companies besides Sigma are developing G.hn-compliant chips. They include Marvell, which bought powerline chip supplier DS2. Lantiq recently acquired Aware, which also was developing G.hn-based ICs. Gigle Networks and Xingtera also are working on G.hn technology.