Sigma Designs has been dabbling in wireless HD technologies for eons, so we aren't going to get too excited until we see this here system-on-chip (SoC) actually hit some products that we care about. Still, the CoAir is a fairly sweet concept, wrapping integrated wireless, coax and gigabit Ethernet capabilities into one single chip aimed at whole home networking. Put simply (or as simply as possible), this chip is the world's first to "simultaneously deliver multiple independent streams of video and data over coax cable, Ethernet cable and wirelessly without compromising quality of service and throughput." Based on the WiMedia standard, it can reach speeds of up to 480Mbps with UWB (ultra-wideband) wireless streaming, and room-to-room linkage via UWB-over-coax can peg those same rates. What we have here is a great basis for building a whole home server on, but until said device emerges and performs flawlessly, we'll just smile and carry on.

Broadcom sure has been on a roll of late, introducing the feature-packed VideoCore III multimedia processor earlier this month and following it with the "world's first 3G phone on a chip" solution. The BCM21551 baseband chip was developed on a single, low-power 65-nanometer CMOS die and features Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, FM radio, an FM transmitter, support for up to five-megapixel cameras, 30fps TV out and "advanced multimedia processing." Notably, you won't find integrated WiFi or GPS, but it does play nice with HSUPA, HSDPA, WCDMA and EDGE cellular protocols. Best of all, this system-on-a-chip is available now to "early access customers," and the low, low $23 pricetag (when purchased in bulk, of course) is music to our ears.

Akustica, which makes its mark building acoustic system-on-chip solutions, has recently introduced what it calls the "world's first HD microphone that enables HD voice quality in laptop PCs and other broadband mobile devices." The firm's AKU2103 is a digital-output microphone with a "guaranteed wideband frequency response," which means that you can sleep easy knowing that your built-in mic complies with the TIA-920 audio performance requirement for wideband transmission. This MEMS device crams the mechanical transducer, output amplifier, and sigma-delta converter onto a single chip of silicon, and touts near-immunity to RF and electromagnetic interference as well as to power supply modulation. The surface-mountable unit measures in at just four- x four-millimeters in size, and while pricing details aren't available to the masses just yet, Akustica plans on sampling the AKU2103 in Q3 of this year.

[Via Slashdot]

While it hasn't come quick nor easy, it looks like more and more vendors are jumping on the WiMAX train, and just a day after Horizon chose Navini to get its WiMAX on, Texas Instruments, ORZA Networks, and Sun Create Electronics are becoming some of the first to receive shipments of Fujitsu's chip. The 5.8GHz WiMAX baseband system-on-chip (SoC) is dubbed the "industry's first" to become commercially available, and while it supports frequencies ranging from 2GHz to 11GHz in both licensed and unlicensed bands, its also "being used in the industry's first commercially available fixed WiMAX CPE supporting the 5.8GHz band." Of course, these all-in-one chips are being marketed and sold specifically to ODMs, but chances are it'll have something to do with your connection to WiMAX if Fujitsu has anything to do with it.

[Via FarEastGizmos]

All the big-time chip kiddies are all about diversity, and now that NVIDIA seems bent on doing things for serious in the GPU, chipset and (most recently) CPU spaces, its next step was pretty natural: go small. That's why it's forking over a cool $357 million for PortalPlayer, the system-on-chip wunderkind behind most some of the biggest music players in the biz -- most recently including the 5G iPod with video and SanDisk Sansa e200 series. However, NVIDIA has its sights set on much more than DAPs, and plans to combine the miniature know-how and processing power of PortalPlayer with NVIDIA's own graphics expertise in a bid to "drive the next digital revolution, where the mobile device becomes our most personal computer." Sounds like a good time for all, especially PortalPlayer stockholders, to which the purchase price represents a 19 percent bump on their stock value as it compares to the 20-day average as of Friday. The boards of both companies have approved the acquisition, and now the only hurdle is regulatory before these two chip fiends start busting out their "digital revolution."