Analog radio chip specialist Telegent of the US, says that it has come up with the perfect hybrid TV chip for Latin America, which offers both analog TV and ISDB-Tb 1Seg digital mobile TV. Faultline revealed that it was working on such a device back in September, but had scant details at the time.
Latin America is the place where the war is most virulent to own mobile TV. In China the official digital standard CMMB, pushed by the operators there, is currently an underdog to handsets which tap into analog TV services, and are sold by distributors and retailers without operator blessings. On the back of the success in China Telegent has sold most of the 90 million chips that it has shipped to date.
In Latin America it also claims to have some inroads to the cellular operators as well as going to market through direct retail chains, and in 2009 signed up the Argentinian branch of Claro, the America Movile subsidiary. Since then Telegent claims that more America Movile and Telefonica subsidiaries have taken at least one model of its analog TV handsets, at Telcel in Mexico and Comcel in Colombia as well as Movistar in Mexico and Peru.
The new chip is called the TLG1180 and it is billed as the first single-chip mobile TV receiver which supports both ISDB-Tb and analog broadcast TV standards with an integrated H.264 decoder.
There are two problems here that we see and the first and most important issue is power consumption. The company has admitted in the past that its analog chips burn around 300 mW of power, compared to most digital mobile TV chips which use around 45 mW on average.
This new chip will intercept a TV signal, and most likely default to the digital signal if both are available. If it has been designed so that the analog logic switches off when the digital side of the chip is being used, as most mobile chips are, then this chip has no need to use any more power than a traditional digital TV chip, except that it is one of the first digital TV designs carried out by Telegent, so that it is likely to be less efficient than perhaps purely digital rivals with a five year history in making digital TV chips.
When it falls back to a purely analog TV signal the chip will burn through a mobile battery in something like 20% of the time and the picture will be far less clear. However Telegent just came out with a new architecture for its analog TV chips, built in 65 nanometer geometry, so it will have made some inroads here.
The device is built to put into low cost phones the company says, and suggests that other rivals, such as Siano, which has a purely digital TV chip for Latin America have been limited to high-end models which already have an H.264 decoder. This is, of course nonsense, given that the decoder for the Siano product is in the chip, and the bill of materials is likely much the same as Telegent’s bill of materials, probably around $5 per handset or less.
But that may not be true of all the chips being thrown at this market, many of which come out of Japan.
The other issue is something called Ginga which is the reference digital TV middleware architecture in Brazil, for putting applications and interactivity on both ISDB-T phones and TV sets. If the Telegent chip does not support this, then many of the mechanisms whereby Latin American operators expect to make revenue, such as advertising interactivity, will not be possible. Telegent never mentioned support for Ginga in its release.
Telegent says that analyst firm Techno Research Systems estimates that 31 million TV handsets will be purchased by Latin American consumers in 2010 and that this number will grow to more than 76 million units by 2014 for both analog and digital TV handsets. Total handset shipments in the region will rise from 133 million to 144 million units during this timeframe, so that’s something like half having TV on them by 2014. The TLG1180 comes as a standard 7 x 7 mm chip and will sample to customers in calendar Q4 of this year.