As has been the case for the last three years or so, the subject of mobile TV attracts huge headlines every spring and autumn, just before the two biggest European exhibitions for mobile technology and broadcasting.

There is good reason for those involved in the mobile TV industry to hype it so much. For mobile telecoms firms it is an attractive application that may go some way to recovering the billions invested in 3G networks. For broadcasters it is yet another channel to offer content on and reap the associated revenues.

Yet the mobile TV market is still very much in its infancy and mass roll-out seems to have been just around the corner for some time.

The 2006 World Cup football was meant to provide the kick, so to speak, that the market needed to move from an early adopter and gadget fan phase to the mainstream. This did happen in some places - in particular Italy - but in the UK it seems things have actually gone backwards since last year.

The damning evidence for this trend was the recently announced closure of BT’s Movio DAB-based mobile TV service which was being offered by Virgin Mobile.

Key among the reasons for the demise of this service was the fact it was supported by only one handset - the Lobster from HTC.

The name alone may have put a lot of people off, but it was felt that the handset’s ‘unique’ design - namely a curved right hand edge designed for optimum holding in the palm of a right hand - contributed greatly as well.

But design of the handset is a crucial element for mobile TV and the pressure is on chip manufacturers to create products that not only address the functional requirements of the application, but also support the design concepts of marketers. And such concepts are likely to be applied, not just to regular mobile phones, but also a variety of handheld products such as laptop/notebook PCs, MP3 players, PDAs, navigation devices, games consoles and even converged infotainment devices.

But whatever the device, there are some fundamentals involving what its electronics should offer.

Key to everything is a high degree of performance, that is, the sensitivity of the chips and their ability to support mobility and cope with interfering signals, and similar parameters. Going further, Yoram Solomon, director of strategic marketing, industry and standards, mobile connectivity, at Texas Instruments, offers a top five for chip design in mobile TV.

“The main requirements are power consumption, low cost, size, multi-path avoidance, and Doppler effect cancellations,” says Solomon. “The last two are reception performance type requirements and they are associated with the fact that you get signals from many different directions and the need to cancel them out.”

Another key issue for mobile TV silicon design is that the market is based on multiple standards and technologies.

There are two principal ways of receiving live mobile TV - mobile TV streams over 3G telecoms networks, or dedicated broadcast mobile TV networks. The latter have gained a lot of headlines from a received wisdom that the former is not able to cope with mass numbers of viewers accessing multiple channels.

There are other methods of accessing TV, such as video-on-demand, cached, or WiFi accessible methods, but by and large the debate is about 3G versus broadcast.

With broadcast there are a number of highly competitive standards. Although these are, strictly speaking, global, certain standards do dominate certain territories. For example, in Japan the dominant standard is ISDB-T; in Korea T-DMB and S-DMB; in the US, MediaFLO and DVB-H.

In Europe, DVB-H currently dominates in terms of thought leadership, but DAB/DMB networks exist and MediaFLO will follow.

All of this places great demands on the chip design firms to come up with products that satisfy the multiple standards.
Ronen Jashek, director of marketing at Siano, believes this has a wider significant for chip makers. “We need to reduce the risk for handset makers. What is really important is that there will be a good variety of handsets and we should allow them to reduce risk in terms of design and development time,” says Jashek. “What we have set out to do is provide multi-standard, multi-path solutions that do exactly this. You also need to support as many interfaces as you can and allow device makers to use the same silicon for different platforms.”

The European Commission (EC) recently stated that DVB-H would be the recommended mobile TV standard for member states, but the announcement split the industry.

“It’s absolutely unrealistic for the EC to say it’s ‘DVB-H for the whole of Europe’,” states Ralph Weir, v-p sales and marketing at Mirics. “What that means is the UK won’t get mobile TV until 2012 because the spectrum won’t be there until digital switchover is completed, whereas mobile TV has already been proven over the DAB network.”

But at what cost in terms of bill of materials (BOM) will support for mobile TV place on device makers?

One of the fundamental dynamics of consumer electronics is to offer lots, as cheaply as possible, to gain mass mar ket acceptance. Azzedine Boubguira, DiBcom‘s v-p of marketing and business development, is confident the industry can respond to these challenges.

“Last year [mobile TV chips] added $10 to BOMs; it’s much lower these days,” says Boubguira. “There’s so much hype and expectation, even though there is no such deployment as yet. It will happen and price is dropping for recovers and it’s now below $7 and will soon go below that.”

This price cut will happen mainly by chip suppliers providing products that work at lower power and take advantage of integration. “We can increase the integration and so offer more for the same dollar. We can look around at system level and see what integration can be done,” adds Boubguira.

Emiliano Sottani, technical marketing manager at Qualcomm CDMA Technologies Europe, concurs, stressing the vital aspect of integration.

“Mobile TV devices last summer needed at least three chips to show mobile TV - you had a baseband, a broadcast chip and then an applications processor,” explains Sottani. “Right now we have the ability to decode H264 signals on one chip and this helps a lot in reducing the power consumption of the device.”

Mirics’ Weir adds: “We have to crack the integration of radio functions into mobile devices and do it at a sensible cost. Complexity could hold back the development of some product.”

A good example of this would be, instead of having five RF devices to cope with five radios, devices have a single RF device that copes with multiple radios. Or, instead of using RF CMOS, bipolar CMOS or other CMOS technology that costs a lot more to manufacture, employing ‘vanilla’ CMOS, so the same CMOS which is used to make standard components is used to build complex radio components.

But it could well be the case that the processor industry is somewhat ahead of itself. No matter what technology is deployed, mobile TV roll-out will be governed by compelling content, compelling handsets and adequate spectrum. If these are not addressed some chip firms may be all dressed up with nowhere to go.