There were too many announcements relating to mobile TV at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to give them all space, and perhaps the biggest omission was the arrival of Infineon into the DVB-H chip space with two chips, one an integrated tuner demodulator and the other, an RF tuner only.
The first device forms part of Infineon’s Omnivia range and the TUS 9090 is an integrated System-on-Chip with multi-band RF tuner, and a DVB-H/T demodulator and integrated memory. When this time slices for DVB-H reception on a 10% duty cycle, it operates at 50mW, in line with the market leading offerings out there, or perhaps slightly above.
It is built in 130nm CMOS and comes as a semi-ball grid array of 8.5 x 8.5 x 0.8 mm or can be integrated by device manufacturers into their own modules to make it more compact.
The other part is called the Omnitune TUA 9001 and is a multi-band silicon tuner, covering VHF, UHF and L-Band and in time slicing mode on a 10% duty cycle, power consumption is only 18mW, which is again competitive, but you need your own modulator with it.
This is a very later entry into the market for Infineon, but comes on the back of renewed efforts by NXP and Broadcom and shows that the volume markets for DVB-H are opening up as DVB-T goes into even wider distribution. The Omnivia TUS 9090 is sampling and will go to volume in the third quarter, and the Omnitune 9001 is also sampling and will go to volume in the second quarter.
Meanwhile PacketVideo, now a subsidiary of US WiMAX equipment designer NextWave, which also owns IP Wireless which offers TDtv, has introduced a matchbox-sized device to receive mobile TV signals and convert them to Wi-Fi so that any Wi-Fi enabled player can view mobile TV broadcasts, and that includes the iPod Touch and the iPhone. The idea is to allow mobile subscribers to upgrade to advanced mobile TV services without changing their handset.
The mobile broadcast receiver will come in numerous mobile TV versions including TDtv, DVB-H and MediaFLO and later there will be a version to pick up WiMAX multicast services. It has already been tested on the Nokia N-series, Apple iPhone and HTC Smartphone devices.
Packet video was one of the first companies to experiment with video on a mobile phone and supplies multimedia software to Verizon, NTT DoCoMo and Orange. Its software is in more than 200 million devices worldwide, across 200 different models, and include devices used to access US satellite radio.
The Packet Video mobile broadcast receiver is 6.4 cm x 1.8 cm x 4 cm deep and will be available later this year and the idea is that operators brand both the device and the service directly, which is why it has such a cumbersome name.
Meanwhile UK cpu core designer ARC international has signed up Packet Video’s sister company IP Wireless, to use its processor design in its TDtv system in package.
ARC also said during the show that Abilis Systems, part of the Kudelski Group (which is the owner of DRM company Nagravision), is using the ARC core design in its mobile TV receiver for DVB-H/T.
The ARC device has long been associated with Mobile TV, and the Siano Mobile silicon multi-band chipsets is based on it, as well as the DVB-H chips designed by Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute.
The new AS-101 ARC design for IP Wireless comes in a 5’5mm CSP package and integrates multi-band RF tuner, advanced OFDM demodulator, memory and interfaces onto a single 90nm CMOS die.