The Sigma Designs Android demo was to be held today at the DigiTimes Tech Forum Multimedia Day in Taipei, Taiwan, according to MIPS. Demonstration of an Android-based STB prototype displaying 1080p video "is a major milestone toward the creation of a reference platform" for an Android-based STB," the company says.

Enhancements to Android

Sigma and MIPS made enhancements to Android libraries and the MIPS architecture to enable Android to run on full-sized HD screens rather than a mobile handset display, says MIPS. In addition, Sigma Designs is said to be have extended libraries within Android to support hardware graphics acceleration and decoding to take advantage of its SoC capabilities for HD. Meanwhile, MIPS itself is making performance optimizations for the MIPS32 architecture for Android that it plans to release "in the future as part of the publicly available Android on MIPS code."

MIPS did not mention which Sigma Designs processor was involved in the demo. However, Sigma's MIPS-based SMP8640 series SoCs are used in STBs, Blu-ray players, and other video-ready devices. The company noted it plans to use Android on DTVs, STBs, and Blu-ray players.

Source: http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Android-on-MIPS-signs-Sigma-Designs-and-ALi-Corp/?kc=rss