If there is one company that gives competition to Qualcomm in terms of chipsets, it has to be MediaTek. Having been the leader in Chinese market, MediaTek is being used in high-end smartphones like HTC One M9+and Sony Xperia C4 etc.
At ongoing CES 2016, MediaTek has unveiled three new chipsets for Ultra-HD 4K Blu-ray players, fitness watches and to bridge Internet of Things(IoT) at home.
“Our intention at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show is to showcase a group of SoC’s that will truly impact the way consumers use their devices,” said MediaTek’s Chief Marketing Officer, Johan Lodenius. “The MT8581, MT2523 and MT7697 will each bring new features to home entertainment, wearables and IoT/connected home that were not possible before.”
MediaTek MT8581
MediaTek MT8581, an integrated multimedia system-on-chip for Ultra High Definition (4K) Blu-ray players. At the moment, MediaTek is the only company to have a specific chip for Blu-ray players and through this, they expect to improve the clarity and contrast of the video and audio beyond what is available in the market.
The chip supports Blu-ray, DVD and CD playback, including BD-ROM format, such as BD-Live and BonusView. It will allow consumers to both scale up to 4K from DVD and scale down to a non-4K screen to accommodate both legacy and cutting-edge screens and discs.
It features HEVC, H.264 and VP9 4K 60p video decoder for 4K (3840x2160p) video content and also MPEG-2, VP8 and VC-1 2K 60p video decoder for legacy 2K HD content. For audio decoding, it supports Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS, and DTS-HD master audio, via multi-format decoding, that can support high quality audio streaming.
Mediatek MT2523
MT2523 has been designed to cater specifically to active and fitness smart watches, which is a very exciting news considering the smartwatch market is currently growing at a good rate. The chipset is first of its kind SiP(system-in-package) which offers GPS, dual-mode Bluetooth Low Energy, and a MIPI-supported high-resolution mobile screen.
The chipset is touted to be 41% percent smaller than the competitors out there, and is relatively easier on the battery as well, which means the space not utilized by the chip can be used for even more battery. MediaTek’s MT2523 is based on a highly integrated SiP that contains a microcontroller unit (MCU), dual-mode Bluetooth, GPS and a power management unit (PMU). The display component supports MIPI-DSI and serial interfaces, resulting in a high-resolution screen. It includes 2D capabilities of true color, per pixel alpha channel and anti-aliasing fonts, plus 1-bit index color to save memory and computing power. MT2523’s sources its power from the ARM Cortex-M4 processor, which helps in low power usage and higher output.
MediaTek MT7697
MediaTek MT7697 is a special series of chips to integrate the Internet of Things (IoT) at homes. The chip delivers Low Energy Bluetooth and dual-band WiFi to integrate various devices at one’s house. MediaTek aims to create a ecosphere of its own through all the devices including wearables, gadgets and appliances connected either via Bluetooth or WiFi. Of course, Bluetooth will be for short range and WiFi will be for long range.
The MT7697 supports Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and provides the highest integration among comparable SoCs, combining and optimizing DB WiFi, BLE, CM4 and RAM. It embeds a power amplifier with TX Power up to 10 decibel-milliwatts (dBm). On iOS devices specifically, MT7697’s BLE supports up to 160 bytes of maximum transmission units (ATT_MTU). MediaTek has also launched MT7967D, a dual-band WiFi version of the chipset, which supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.
MediaTek has gained a lot of traction in the last few years because of competitive options at lower prices as compared to its competitors. Since this particular industry is rapidly changing every now and then, there has to be a ‘first’ in everything to lure more customers. Winning the Amazon 4K Fire TV Box and Fire HD Tablets deal for 2016, MediaTek has just upped its game and it is time for competitors to catch-up.
