DiBcom has made it a full set of DVB Project backed TV components and has announced what it says is the world’s first DVB-SH receiver, which will be on show at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, next week.
DiBcom began life saying that it saw no point to multi-protocol chips, which came out from rivals, all trying to offer a single chip to place in a phone for every variety of global mobile TV going forwards. Since then it has adapted that position to support all the DVB Project ratified standards, which now includes the satellite terrestrial hybrid designed by Alcatel to work in 2.1GHz S-Band (although the system will also work in UHF, we are told).
Alcatel has drawn around it a largely French eco-system for its DVB-SH efforts with Sagem (alongside Samsung) offering handsets, and the French DibCom agreeing to do a chip. The fact that it was working on a chip for DVB-SH has been well known since September 2007, when it announced that it had been chosen by ICO Communications, a Craig McCaw owned US satellite company that has partnered with Alcatel to create initially what is an in-car TV service in the US.
But it is a far cry from saying that you will do a chip for DVB-SH to the point where a chipset is actually delivered, and since the device will be on show, this is a less than six month turnaround for the new chip, something which suggests that either it is a variant of its existing chipset, or it has been working on it much earlier than last September, or both. In actual fact the finished part will only be in samples in the third quarter 2008 despite the fact that something will need to be deployed in an in-car ICO trial during Spring 2008, and also in two cities in the US, one of which is Las Vegas, for in-building delivered mobile TV trials. So it looks like these are sample levels of prototypes.
As the end-to-end network integrator for ICO, Alcatel-Lucent will develop the system architecture and network design, and provide end-to-end multivendor network integration for the alpha trial in the US in-car system.
“We have assembled world-class technology partners in Alcatel-Lucent and Hughes for our MIM alpha trial, and as a world leader in mobile television, DiBcom is the perfect complement to the alpha trial team,” says Tim Bryan, chief executive officer of ICO. “With the launch of ICO G1 and the commencement of our alpha trial, ICO will be uniquely positioned to deliver a superior mobile video experience combined with our voice and data capabilities.”
The device is the DIB29098 and it takes input from two antennas on a single chip (the MIM in-car system will have up to four in fact). This offers spectral diversity and dramatically enhances receiver performance.
DiBcom’s DIB29098 has dual RF tuners supporting VHF, UHF, L-Band and S-Band frequencies, a dual demodulator that processes DVB-T, DVB-H and DVB-SH signals, and a turbo-decoder for the DVB-SH FEC.