MediaTek on Monday announced threen new SoCs. The MT7697 SoC has been designed to help bridge Internet of Things (IoT) in the home. The MediaTek MT8581 is a multimedia system-on-chip for Ultra High Definition (4K) Blu-ray players, and the MT2523 series has been designed for active and fitness smart watches. Expected to power devices in in the first half of 2016, the the MT2523 series is the first system-in-package (SiP) to offer GPS, dual-mode Bluetooth Low Energy, and a MIPI-supported high-resolution mobile screen.

The SoC combines long battery life, high-quality display technology, and small chip size. In comparison to other wearables, devices powered by MT2523 can last more than a week on one battery charge, according to Mediatek.

MediaTek's MT2523 product family is based around a system in package (SiP) that contains a micro controller unit (MCU), dual-mode Bluetooth, GPS and a power management unit (PMU). The MCU enables wearable devices with lower power consumption and smaller form factors than Android Wear. The display component supports MIPI-DSI and serial interfaces, resulting in a high-resolution mobile 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 low power comes from its ARM Cortex-M4 processor, which combines signal processing functionality with low power, low cost and ease-of-use benefits.

The second SoC announced today is the MediaTek MT8581, a highly integrated multimedia system-on-chip for Ultra High Definition (4K) Blu-ray players. The MT8581 will power the first Blu-ray players to use both Ultra-HD (UHD) and high-dynamic range imaging (HDR).

The MediaTek MT8581 can support Blu-ray, DVD and CD playback, including the latest 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 (3840x2160) video content and also MPEG-2, VP8 and VC-1 2K 60p video decoder for legacy 2K (1920x1080 video content). For audio decoding, it has capabilities for 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 plans to start mass production of the MT8581 in the second half of 2016.

For Smart Home products, Mediatek is offering the MT7697 platform, which powers Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections.

The MT7697 supports Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and provides the high integration, 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's MT7697 will be available in the first half of 2016.