Newport Media, one of the many fabless semiconductor companies targeting mobile TV components, this week said it has begun customer sampling for its NMI310 single-chip Sundance H mobile digital TV receiver.
The device will handle DVB-H, DVB-T and serves as the foundation for its future chips that will also handle T-DMB, Japan’s ISDB-T as well as MediaFlo, among other standards, the company said.
Given that there are now more than a dozen mobile TV technologies, multi-standard formats are now swamping the market and early claims that only one standard was required, namely DVB-H, is now being shown to be just first round positioning.
Newport is the chip company best known because it has already signed an intellectual property deal with Qualcomm to license its MediaFLO receiver technology IPR. Last year it had a two-chip solution and now claims to lead in power consumption (so does everybody else), best-in-class RF performance and sub two second channel switching speed.
‘We have been developing digital mobile TV systems and semiconductor technology since the company’s inception, and have now introduced the industry’s most highly integrated and commercially mature DVB-H/DVB-T solution,’ said Mohy Abdelgany, president and chief executive officer of Newport Media.
The truth is that a new chip comes to market every week, and the huge lead by DiBcom, now on its second generation devices, and by Siano, which has been in volume manufacturing for six months, are virtually unassailable. DiBcom has by far the highest number of design wins, and last week Sharp launched its own technology. DAB specialist Frontier has already entered the market for DVB-H and T-DMB chips, while Qualcomm has launched a DVB-H/MediaFLO chip and we are still waiting for Texas Instruments and Philips to ship volume of their planned DVB-H chips.
The NM1310 has quad-band, direct-conversion radio, a DVB-H demodulator and all the necessary memory and Newport claims it outperforms alternative systems in sensitivity, channel switching time and interference immunity and can receive up to eight simultaneous channels, although that’s going to kill your battery off awfully fast.
The company says that power consumption is at an industry-low 20mW, which is lower than most of the figures we have heard quoted to date, but it also claims a 10dB advantage, something we’re not in a position to test, but which sounds unlikely.
However because it is all a system on a chip, Newport says that in 10,000 volumes it is just $8 a unit, which is low certainly.
The device is manufactured using CMOS and packaged in ball grid array. Volume production is scheduled in the third quarter.