US firm MIPS Technologies is demoing the world's first Android-based set-top boxes at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, currently taking place in Las Vegas, in conjunction with its complementary solution partners.

"MIPS is the number one architecture for the digital home, and our optimisations of the Android platform are critical for enabling our customers to deliver the next generation of products for the connected digital home and beyond," said Art Swift, Vice President of Marketing for MIPS Technologies.  "Together with our partners, we've made great progress in optimising Android for a broad range of consumer devices.  We've delivered a full HD experience to Android, and now we're delivering multi-channel audio and enhanced user interfaces required for digital home devices.  We anticipate seeing the first Android-based devices in our living rooms in 2010."

Western Mediabridge, a Celrun company, and Sigma Designs, a provider of digital media processing SoC solutions, will demonstrate the world's first commercially available Android set-top box.  The MIPS-based set-top box will feature video-on-demand, ThinkFree Office viewer software, a Web browser, remote control/keyboard interface and 1080p video quality.

MIPS will also demonstrate a prototype of an Android-based IPTV set-top box developed by KDDI R&D Labs, a subsidiary of Japanese telco KDDI, which supports multicasting, video-on-demand, a remote control interface and digital rights management.  The prototype is based on the MIPS-based SMP8654 media processors from Sigma Designs.