The chip industry’s obsessive interest in all things mobile TV continues with separate moves by Intel, Frontier Silicon and Qualcomm
Intel is interested in providing silicon for mobile TV and has taken an interest in the multi-band, multi-standard receiver chipset designed by an Israeli company called Siano Mobile Silicon.
This can be viewed as a response by Intel to leading mobile silicon firm
Qualcomm, which made its interest in mobile TV clear last month with its own plans for multi-standard mobile TV silicon.
“We view [mobile digital TV] as one of the next killer applications for mobile devices,” said Barry Evans, general manager of Intel’s applications processor business unit.
Siano’s chipset supports DVB-H, DVB-T, DAB, Enhanced Packet Mode DAB (IP-DAB) and T-DMB mobile digital standards, so is applicable to markets in the US, Europe and
Asia Pacific.
Qualcomm’s chipset supports its own FLO platform, as well as DVB-H and ISDB-T standard used in Japan.
Siano’s SMS1000 tuner chipset is in production and, according to the firm, has been designed into a number of handsets to be launched around the turn of the year.
UK-based chipset supplier, Frontier Silicon, is offering a design kit which the firm hopes will speed the introduction of mobile TV applications using its silicon.
The kit, named Troy, contains Frontier Silicon’s Apollo RF receiver and Kino 2 chipset for mobile
TV applications.
The firm’s RF tuner for T-DMB, called Apollo, supports Band-III, Band II and L-Band reception with power consumption less than 80mW. It also has the Kino 2 multi-mode device which supports T-DMB variants in China, Korea and Germany.
Configurable through a USB interface, it receives a T-DMB RF signal on Band III and L Band, and delivers an MPEG-2 transport stream to a host processor for audio and
video decoding.
Last week, Analog Devices paid $127m for a South Korean company specialising in DMB and ISDB-T mobile TV chips.