While it is no secret that US chipmaker Broadcom feels it has the momentum, economics and skillset to take on the entire mobile chip chain, its activities on mobile TV have so far been entirely invisible except perhaps for its acquisition of Athena Semiconductor back in October 2005.
Back then most analysts saw the acquisition ‘ cheap at $21.6 million ‘ as a bid to get more deeply into low power wi-fi. After all wi-fi as a component remains in far higher volumes ‘ but with far greater competition ‘ than mobile TV. Lower power wi-fi was the building block for creating dual mode handsets, with wi-fi low enough in power to not drain a handset battery and expectations that it would be a 100 million device market this coming year.
Mobile TV was always looking at that kind of volume perhaps two years down the road and so perhaps it was not the basis for Athena being acquired.
But our own research shows (see latest report ‘Broadcasters versus Cellcos; The real war in Mobile TV – Global Forecast 2008 to 2012’) that the mobile TV market is likely to be at least as attractive as Wi-Fi in the medium term. Although this has been held back by the various schisms in technologies aimed at mobile TV ‘ we track around 14 separate, unrelated technologies in this market – this is still especially true in the DVB world, if you include DVB-T chipsets. So it isn’t too surprising that Broadcom, like many before it, has focused on DVB-T and DVB-H on the same chip, despite them previously having widely varied power requirements ‘ at least the same chip can be used both on a PC to capture higher resolution standard definition TV, and in a handset for the Quarter VGA that makes up most mobile TV.
While the market leader to date DiBcom came out of DVB-T and has naturally stayed focused on DVB technologies, including DVB-H, others such as Siano Mobile Silicon has added ISDB-T, T-DMB, the new Chinese CMMB STiMi and is contemplating MediaFLO ‘ all either on the same chip or on a mildly varying chip design. NXP last week ended a two year silence by launching a $2 tuner chip with low power requirements, with support for DVB-T, DVB-H, DVB-SH, T-DMB and ISDB-T.
That chip is only the tuner and a further chip needs to be added to offer demodulation and any plug and play features with host processors, but it was certainly a signal that the chip market for mobile TV is ready to offer enough volumes that the major players are now entering the fray in earnest. NXP has partnered with Taiwan’s Afa Technologies and its AF9100 multi-standard demodulator. The next step is perhaps to put both devices on one chip like the pioneers in the market have.
Not only did the NXP launch suggest that players like Broadcom would unveil soon, but also that Texas Instruments and perhaps other leading video chip makers such as ST Micro, will soon enter the market. Qualcomm already has.
Although DVB-H will not have a clear run in the US, China, Japan or Korea, it is set pretty fair to make hay in Europe, much of South Asia and places like Russia, India and Africa ‘ and it will end up as the dominant standard out of the 5 or 6 we expect to see flourish. So it makes it reasonable that the first efforts of most mobile TV chip makers will begin with DVB-H which has such momentum in terms of countries saying it will adopt it, and then move onto ISDB-T which is already in high chip volumes and opening on a second front in Brazil, and then take in DVB-SH and the Chinese STiMi, before somehow accommodating ATSC’s nascent Mobile Handheld standard in time for 2009.
One of the most staunch backers of DVB-H has been Nokia, expected to be a major recipient of royalties for the standard once an intellectual property license is set. Nokia has been making its own DVB-H chips for handsets from the outset, but has hinted recently that it is ready to offer up all of its collected DVB-H know how and give it to one of its tame semiconductor suppliers to product ‘ which are Texas instruments, Broadcom, ST Micro and Infineon. Whoever gets their hands on that Nokia contract is likely to be handed about 50 million extra chips worth of business over the coming 5 years – and this announcements appears timed to put Broadcom in the driving seat for such a deal. Of course the favorite where Nokia is concerned is always TI, but right now it has been quiet on the mobile TV chip front for the past two years, making a version of its Hollywood chip for the ISDB-T market of Japan, but elsewhere plodding in low sample volumes.
The Broadcom device is a 65 nm digital TV single-chip receiver on a monolithic standard digital CMOS die, which it says is aimed at longer battery life, better reception and lower costs. The chip is being brought out for demonstration at next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain called the BCM2930 and it comes with a dual-mode demodulator and a tuner, unlike the NXP part.
“By marrying best-in-class mobile TV tuner technology from the Athena Semiconductor acquisition and our core demodulator IP together with leading edge process technology, Broadcom has delivered a compelling solution to our customers,” said Dino Bekis, Director of New Business Initiatives for Broadcom’s Wireless Connectivity Group.
Broadcom claims a power advantage of 40% and a footprint lead of 30% over existing designs operating at 160mW when receiving DVB-H signals and a constant 209mW when receiving DVB-T. The DVB-H mode is fairly typical of DVB-H system, which tend to average 40 to 45 mW because much of the device is switched off between bursts, saving about 90% plus of the power output associated with the radio, and the battery only has to drive the applications processor and the screen. However the low power between DVB-H time-slices on the Broadcom chip is down to less than 0.8mW, so the average is likely to be under 40 mW on this device, certainly making it competitive, though we don’t believe it will be revolutionary.
The power output for DVB-T is a constant drain, and so is around five times as high on this chip as the DVB-H reception, which is perhaps fine for a TV card for a desktop or a laptop computer, but not anything smaller than that.