Samsung Electronics has very uncharacteristically taken its time entering the mobile TV chip business, launching a device built in 65 nanometer geometry, which is a multi-standard decoder sitting alongside a multi-band RF tuner.
The device supports DVB-H and DVB-T, as well as DAB-IP, ISDB-T, and T-DMB. The big missing standards are MediaFLO, and the new Chinese standard, perhaps not yet well enough defined to commit to silicon.
Interestingly Samsung has already launched a MediaFLO phone at the beginning of last year, presumably with a chip design from Qualcomm. Since then Qualcomm has introduced a merchant part which supports both DVB-H and MediaFLO, a move that will get it into all the big mobile TV markets around the world except Japan, China and Korea.
But for DVB-H until now Samsung has relied on the earliest pioneer of the DVB-H chip world, DiBcom. The way Samsung is run is in tiny fiefdoms, and the handset maker is not obliged to use the chips from the semiconductor division, and Samsung is likely to continue to use DiBcom chips for DVB-H and Qualcomm chips for MediaFLO and the entire US market, for some time to come.
DiBcom tells us that this is because it is in second generation silicon and its chips give better in-building penetration than any other chip on the market, claiming a 3 dB advantage and therefore Samsung is unlikely to replace the DiBcom chip with its own any time soon. Second placed rival Siano however says that it goes the other way around, claiming that measurements show that the Siano chip has better sensitivity than the Dibcom chip, in DVB-H and in DVB-T, citing its chip sensitivity in DVB-H at -98.7 dBm (dB reference to 1 milliwatt).
Whatever the truth of that Samsung rarely comes to market with a Rolls Royce product, but is always competitive on price and it is likely that it will dent the market leads of both of these players if its DVB-H chip works acceptably.
And while Texas Instruments is still only sending out samples of its DVB-H component and appears to have stopped work on it around a year ago and Philips has gone similarly quiet, new players like Newport Media, which last month came out if an $8 chip, are still bearing down on this multi-standard segment.
“Although a new market, we see high growth potential in mobile TV applications,” said Yiwan Wong, vice president, Marketing Team, System LSI Division, Semiconductor Business, Samsung Electronics. “With initial product launch targets for the Europe and Asia markets, we are introducing our high performance mobile TV chipset technology with added feature support to serve the needs of the entire mobile TV industry.”
Samsung’s new multi-band RF tuner, is a general purpose tuner that supports UHF, VHF and L-band commonly used in Europe and the US and the new chipset comes either as two chips or a system-in-chip package (SiP) with volume production scheduled for the fourth quarter.