Demand for analogue TV on mobile devices has seen a California-based start-up firm ramp up shipments of its analogue TV single chip to one million per month since production started in March 2007.

According to Dr Sam Sheng, chief technical officer and co-founder of Telegent Systems: “When we first started out we asked every customer: ‘What would you like from us?’ This was when DVB-H was just getting started and all our customer feedback said: ‘That’s great but I’ve got all these customers worldwide that won’t be able to access DVB-H, but want to be able to use something that’s free to air, in particular analogue’."

“Our customers said, if you can deliver a true analogue, through the air solution, there’s a market,” said Sheng. The aim was to provide “low power, high performance and a good user experience”.

According to Sheng, the real challenge in getting analogue TV in a handheld device has been power consumption and dealing with a system not designed for mobility.

“We’re talking about a system that’s 60 years old, and it was never envisioned that have to pack a complete receiver into something the size of a candy bar,” said Sheng.

The fabless semiconductor firm decided to start with a blank slate and replace the whole system using 21st century signal processing.

“What we’ve done is create a single chip television and integrated all the electronics in TV, bar the display, in this single chip,” said Sheng. “The integration is not for integration’s sake, it’s because you need all of the pieces working together and talking to each other in a very complicated way to make sure don’t have picture rolling or excess snow.”