Israeli mobile TV chipmaker Siano Mobile Silicon has come out with its second generation multi-protocol chip, and claims major advances in power consumption and indoor reception, as well as adding the capability to receive ISDB-T signals, the first generation terrestrial and mobile TV technology from Japan, recently also taken up by Brazil.
The first Siano chip, the SMS1000 already took the company into DVB-H, DVB-T, DAB, DAB-IP and T-DMB, but given that there are more mobile TV handsets and portable devices shipped in Japan (18.5 million so far) than the rest of the world put together, it seemed a shame that Siano was missing out on what many people had originally thought would be only a terrestrial TV technology market, with low usage of mobile TV.
The key to the huge success, in Japan at least, is the fact that the ISDB-T services are free to air. ISDB-T mobile TV is also known as 1-seg, due to the fact that the mobile TV signal is a single segment of an OFDM signal, squeezed in with 12 other segments, used for terrestrial TV, in a 13 slice terrestrial TV broadcasting system, each having 429 KHz of spectrum across a 6 MHz channel.
The SMS1100 is a new cut of the Siano chip able to tune and decode ISDB-T signals, as well as all the other formats, including the slightly different Brazilian ISDB-T format called Sistema Brasileiro de Televisao Digital Terrestre (SBTD-T), with the biggest difference being support for the H.264 codec (which Japan has now anyway).
Siano says that its chips can now be used with emerging mobile TV services in Russia, across Europe, Korea, Japan, South East Asia, and Brazil, with further developments expected in China and the US.
Siano has already told us that yet another cut of its chip will include the emerging STiMi home grown mobile TV standard in China.
It also says that the new SMS1100 has exceptionally high mobility and sensitivity performance, though it doesn’t fully explain how this is achieved, except to say that it is based on adding a channel estimation engine to the chip. Other approaches have focused on extra antennas in the past rather than finding out more about the shape of the OFDM signal and tracking it, which is what takes place in channel estimation.
Siano reckons that field trials have demonstrated that mobile TV can be picked up inside garages and other “deep-indoor” locations, including riding fast trains such as France’s TGV or Japan’s Shinkansen (Bullet Train), or driving on Germany’s Autobahn highway.
Siano cites the SMS1100 power usage as 165 mW for both tuner and baseband combined, but this is taken when it was receiving a High Definition TV broadcast over DVB-T. DVB-H, which is sent in high speed bursts and then played out later usually takes up around 195 mW when the radio is on, and averages around 40 mW to 45 mW throughout viewing times, but DVB-T is notoriously more battery heavy, and the data delivered to a screen on HD is around 5 times the rate for SD, 20 times that of mobile TV. Those numbers therefore appear pretty impressive, and way ahead of industry averages and this means that the chip can double as a HD device for a laptop or as a cellphone chip.
“2008 will witness the expansion of mobile TV beyond Japan, Korea and Italy into most of Europe, South East Asia, China and Brazil,” said Alon Ironi, Siano’s CEO. “At the same time, DVB-T technology, already broadcasted in over 40 countries worldwide is now available on-the-go, with many HDTV channels set to be introduced.’
The new SMS1100 family can be tailored for different specific applications for example, the SMS1150 can go in a notebook pc that can be shipped in Japan or in a DVB-T country, and comes with a High-Speed USB 2.0 interface and full MRC diversity support, while the SMS1130 targets DVB-H cell phones. The SMS1100 is available in samples now, with mass-production in Q1 2008.