For a long time we’ve been trying to work out what Dell was going to do on its promised netbooks which are supposed to support ATSC M/H and we had almost concluded that the only chip that it COULD buy would be the one from ATSC M/H inventor LG, which so far has been driving the entire broadcast mobile TV market in America.
But it turns out that Dell has gone to MaxLinear to create its beta ATSC-M/H Netbooks which allow owners to watch TV on the go, without burning up their batteries. MaxLinear becomes only the second company which has produced a full SoC chip for ATSC M/H and being a US based company, is likely to rapidly gain ascendancy in this US sub-market where ultra low power is not a requirement (i.e. everywhere but phones).
The MaxLinear MxL111SF chips are also being used in dongles devices from Hauppauge Computer Works which were also developed for the ATSC-M/H field trials now running in Washington, DC.
Dell has been an ardent supporter of ATSC-M/H technology and considers it a key element of the Dell product strategy to merge personal technology with digital TV entertainment, said a MaxLinear statement.
The trial in question is being sponsored by the Open Mobile Video Coalition and is running throughout Washington offering nine TV stations. Some 200 consumers have been equipped with the specially designed beta Dell Inspiron Mini 10 Netbooks, and 160 users with Sprint mobile phones as part of the trials, which started in July and run through Oct. 2010.
Previously MaxLinear told us it regretted missing out on earlier ATSC M/H trials and confessed it had a project to build in ATSC M/H demodulation into its product range. The chip in question is called the MxL111SF, which comes in a 7x7mm package. This family came into being in September 2009. It was introduced as a two part family with more to come, but it appeared to target DVB-T signals, and considered the chip as using quite high power consumption at around 450 mW, which would mean it would not suit a phone, but perhaps a PC. It also never had the full ATSC M/H modulation and at the time MaxLinear said it was for DVB-T and other analog and digital standards including full ATSC, ISDB-T, DTMB, NTSC, PAL, SECAM, DVB-C, & DOCSIS.
The device provides huge frequency coverage from 44MHz to 1GHz and the chips were targeted at TV sets, and set-tops and Hauppauge said that it will put them into a PC dongle in the form of a USB stick.
In the US over 100 TV broadcast stations are broadcasting mobile DTV services in the ATSC-M/H format, including stations in 15 of the top 20 local markets and the ATSC broadcast standard has also been adopted by Canada, Mexico, South Korea and Honduras, but that’s about all.
‘Consumers are expected to rapidly adjust to being able to view digital broadcast TV anywhere, any time on just about any device, an activity made possible by ATSC-M/H technology,’ said Jim Clardy, mobile TV technology strategist at Dell. ‘Dell has been an ardent supporter of ATSC-M/H technology and considers it a key element of the Dell product strategy to merge personal technology with digital TV entertainment.’
The move will come as a blow to Siano Mobile Silicon, which had provided the TV chips for Dell in every other part of the world, where Dell has to accept DVB-T, CMMB, ISDB-T and T-DMB signals. These have been built into the motherboards of PCs, not plugged in as USB dongles.