It is too early for a single chip for mobile TV, according to the major supplier of chips to mobile phone handsets, DibCom.
Frontier Silicon recently launched the industry’s first single chip that handles both major mobile TV standards in both the baseband and the RF, ahead of established players such as Texas Instruments and start-ups such as Siano and Newport Media.
However, DibCom, which supplies the majority of chips for the DVB-H standard, said it is too early and too expensive for the handset makers.
DibCom has released a version of its digital terrestrial DVB-T chip for lower cost applications, and sees cost optimisation for different markets, rather than a single chip solution, as more important.
“This is for three reasons,” said Yanick Levy, CEO of DibCom. “The basebands are different because there is different price pressure in the different markets and we want to be the most cost effective,” he said.
“We are already driven by cost but at this point we think this is the best cost because the baseband is still quite large compared to the RF so it is better to shrink that alone. At some point, perhaps in 2008, there will be a system on a chip but not at this point,” he said. DibCom also uses more hardwired functions in the chip to keep the cost and power consumption down.
Frontier is the major suplier of T-DMB chips into Korea, and its Paradiso single chip handles both DVB-H and T-DMB standards using the UCC digital signal processor from Imagination Technologies. This is scheduled for mass production in 2008 said Mark Hopgood, mobile TV business development manager at Frontier. “TV has to get into the mass market, mid-range ‘fashion’ phones to be successful so we get more flexibility by mopping up everything in the front-end [chip],” he said.