NXP, the old Philips mobile TV business broke a two year silence since it first said it would chase the mobile TV chip market, by announcing a breakthrough low power, low price chip that will undermine most of the existing devices out there. In high volumes the chips are for sale at $2 each, compared to $10, and use around half the power of existing chips on the market, making them ideal for handsets.
The last thing that Philips did about its DVB-H chip was to issue the second generation chip in April 2006, which it said was 6 times smaller than the crude effort it brought to market just to get itself included in early DVB-H trials. It had only launched its first chip in January 2006.
But the new chip is a complete rethink, following on the increasingly obvious strategy adopted initially by companies like Israel’s Siano, but now almost universally accepted, of using one device to support almost all the broadcast mobile TV standards out there.
The NXP multi-band silicon tuner comes with support for DVB-T, DVB-H, DVB-SH, T-DMB and ISDB-T. The only technologies that it has failed to put into the device are Qualcomm’s MediaFLO and the Chinese home grown STiMi mobile TV technology. And who’s to say that it won’t add a Chinese version of the chip later, or that it’s not working with a local Chinese company jointly on such a device.
Interestingly it is one of the first chip makers to acknowledge the value of the DVB-SH implementation of Alcatel. The other one is DiBcom, but we very much got the impression that DiBcom was paid by Alcatel to adapt its chipset to DVB-SH, and that NXP is simply acknowledging that DVB-SH actually may lead to sales. DVB-SH is identical to DVB-H except for the fact that it uses the more efficient turbo codes in its FEC and the spectrum which is 2.1 GHz.
The new TDA18292 also has a tuner that will support VHF, UHF, L1, L2, S-band spectrum, from 300 MHz right up to over 2 GHz.
But the two things that stand out about this chip are its ultra-low power threshold and its price. It says that in DVB-H mode it operates at 20mW, around half the power of most of the devices already out there when working with DVB-H, just 170mW when it is used with the far more power hungry DVB-T and 80mW with T-DMB, which, like DVB-T, has a continuous battery drain, unlike DVB-H’s burst approach, which switches off the radio for large parts of the time.
The NXP chip also boasts that it is exceptionally low noise, has a remarkably small footprint and has high immunity to other cellular signals and will target the chip at notebooks, USB sticks for PCs, Portable Multimedia Players, portable DVD players, mobile phones, portable navigation systems and virtually any other handheld devices
The chip would have to work in all the channel bandwidths associated with those technologies and it does, offering 1.5MHz to 8 MHz channels
The device is 5mm x 5mm, which considering it does so much compares well with its previous effort which measured 7×7 mm, and the initial device with was a colossal 15mm x 26 mm.
Most mobile TV operations have assumed that both NXP and Texas had dropped out of contention, given that neither company has openly said that it is shipping anything new on mobile TV for almost two years. When we interviewed Texas Instruments recently, it told us that it was still offering its Hollywood chip in low volumes, and would ramp the device once there was a market to fulfill.
That type of approach has left the mobile TV market to DVB-H pioneer DiBcom, as well as Siano Mobile Silicon and the US Newport Media and a handful of other start ups, with the first two establishing key design wins, and having had time to work through multiple chip designs and open up new markets like China, as it tools up for mobile TV in the run up to the 2008 Summer Olympics.
NXP also announced a deal for the new tuner with Afa Technologies of Taiwan, to integrate into its AF9100 multi-standard demodulator series of devices, but that’s hardly an endorsement given that last June NXP said that it was working with Afa to design a DVB-T chip, of exceptionally low power, and that this is clearly either that chip or another derived from the same work.
All of this tells us that at least NXP is serious about making money out of mobile TV chips, and the fact that one of the majors has come back to the mobile TV table, with a brand new chip effort that is competitive, means that the mobile TV market is earmarked to take off.