Sigma Designs

» see sigmadesigns.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Sigma Designs was founded in Fremont in 1982 and spent thirty-six years making the part of a product that nobody reads the label on. Boards first, then systems on a chip: decoders for IPTV set-top boxes, media processors for televisions, the silicon in portable players and digital media adapters, and home networking parts that pushed data over the coaxial and power wiring already in the walls. It kept offices in seven countries outside California, from Denmark to Singapore, and traded on NASDAQ as SIGM from 1986.

Its first consumer-visible thing was RealMagic, a line of MPEG decoder boards for ordinary computers. That was a product with a brief and specific reason to exist. A PC of the mid-1990s could not decode compressed video in software without stuttering. You bought a card that did the decoding in hardware instead, and once it was in the slot the machine could play a video disc. The window closed as processors got fast enough to do it themselves, and the company moved its decoders into other people's boxes instead.

That move is the whole second half of the story. From 2005 Sigma parts were inside many of the first Blu-ray players. In late 2007 it shipped the SMP863x, the first media player chipset capable of 1080p, and a generation of standalone media boxes grew out of it, including the Popcorn Hour machines that people on forums argued about for years. The company bought Gennum's VXP image processing in February 2008, Zensys and its Z-Wave home control technology that December, the Israeli networking firm CopperGate for $160 million in October 2009, and agreed in 2012 to take Trident Microsystems' digital television assets for $21 million.

~ the case file ~

~ the card in the slot ~

The interesting distance here is not geographic. Sigma Designs parts shipped into every market including mine, inside set-top boxes and televisions, and the company name meant nothing to me at the time. It meant nothing to most of the people holding its output either. This is the normal condition of a component vendor. You own the thing it is inside, you form opinions about the thing it is inside, and the name on the chip never enters the conversation.

Which is why the RealMagic boards matter more than their revenue ever did. Briefly, in the 1990s, the decoder was something you chose on purpose and installed yourself, so it had a brand on the box and an argument attached to it. Everything the company made afterward was better engineered and completely anonymous.

~ the paperwork ~

On 7 December 2017 Silicon Labs signed an agreement to buy the whole company for about $282 million. On 23 January 2018 Sigma announced it could not satisfy certain closing conditions, and proposed the alternative: sell the Z-Wave business to Silicon Labs for $240 million and wind the rest of the company up. The video and media assets went to V-Silicon under a purchase agreement dated 15 February.

The shareholders met on 17 April 2018 and approved the Plan of Liquidation and Dissolution by 27,601,660 votes to 1,159,240, with 83,363 abstaining. The Z-Wave sale closed the next day. On 4 May the company filed its Certificate of Election to Wind Up and Dissolve with the California Secretary of State, and its own quarterly report described what was left of the business in one line: the Company's sole purpose is winding down its remaining business.

The first liquidating distribution came that July at six dollars a share. There is no DNS record for sigmadesigns.com today. realmagic.com does resolve, and it lands on a company that sells relationship software to small businesses.

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