The sometimes (but not always) reliable Taiwan based DigiTimes says that it has it on the highest authority that Nokia has been prowling the streets of Taiwan looking over the manufacturing plants of rival DVB-H chip makers. Nokia to date has devised its own tuner chips for DVB-H handsets, and will now put the contract out as volumes begin to rise.
This immediately puts into the frame France’s DiBcom, the global market leader for DVB-H chips, Israeli Siano Mobile Silicon and Nokia’s long term partner Texas Instruments, thought to have already abandoned its DVB-H plans because it has said nothing about them for well over a year.
US start up Newport Media will surely love a call as would UK beginner Mirics. A less likely contender is Samsung, which makes a DVB-H chip, but which doesn’t even use it for its own DVB-H devices, and which of course would mean that Nokia was dependent upon one of its biggest handset rivals.
Naturally Nokia would not buy from Qualcomm, not while it is involved in a huge intellectual property dispute across many fronts, but one of them is the similarity of DVB-H technology to MediaFLO. For similar reasons Sharp’s new DVB-H devices might also be outlawed from the negotiation because it is so deeply aligned with the FLOForum, as is Siano to some extent, although it is considered the global second placed producer in terms of design wins.
Philips, like Texas has a stalled DVB-H project, that must have changed hands when NXP was sold off to take chip making outside Philips, and we have heard nothing of its proposed chip for some time.
A natural outsider, is Broadcom because of the anti-Qualcomm alignment that it has in common with Nokia, and the fact that Nokia tends to share its R&D behind a project, such as its DVB-H chip, with whomever gets to build it. Broadcom to date has no design wins for its DVB-H chipsets that we know if which it inherited when it bought Athena Semiconductors in October 2005.
And back in August Nokia listed its four preferred chip suppliers going forwards, obviously staying course with its dominant supplier Texas Instruments, but adding Broadcom for EDGE, STMicro for UMTS and Infineon for GSM. The failure of TI to come out with a DVB-H part might convince Nokia to either go with the global specialist DiBcom or use a different partner from among its four lead chip partners in Broadcom, which clearly already has some DVB-H chip skills on board.
Siano, DiBcom and Newport are all just designers, which rely on Chinese chip makers to produce the finished chips, and while Broadcom also works this way and TI is gradually reducing its own foundries, Broadcom has the market weight given its existing order base for wi-fi, video and DSL chips to command the right attention and pricing.