Spain’s (Semiconductores Investigaci’n y Dise’o SA) better known as Sidsa
has licensed its DVB-H Intellectual Property technology to chipbuilder Infineon Technologies, and it will be used as the basis of a new line of DVB-T and DVB-H digital mobile TV chips.
Sidsa’s demodulator IP core and IC reference design will be used in Infineon’s new OmniVia system on a Chip, which will offer both DVB-H and DVB-T, will support both L Band and UHF spectrum, and will work with either 4k mode (twice as many OFDM carriers as the more common 2K mode) or 2K mode.
Sidsa told us back as early as September last year that it was planning to license its intellectual property on DVB-H chips, and focus instead on implementations like the one it has in Russia, at Ekaterinburg in the region of Sverdlovsk, which is due to go live any day now.
This will be the first DVB-H service live in Russia, with 15 TV channels, including pay TV, pay-per-view options and free-to-air channels.
Sidsa is just a 75 man company and yet it seems to have tried to do everything in mobile TV, build networks, make DVB-H broadcasting platforms, and design chips, video encoders and IP encapsulators, handset software and its own conditional access system.
The company started life as a fabless semiconductor design company, SIDSA is owned by Investment groups Inova and Baring Group and is located in Madrid, Spain
Sidsa also said it would focus on the market for non-handset devices in DVB-H, supplying chips directly to equipment builders. Infineon is clearly its key European chip manufacturing licensee, but Sidsa told us that it would also sign a US license shortly to use its design, a deal that six months later has yet to emerge
The whole Sidsa approach to the market is quite strange but the Infineon relationship will suddenly add significant credibility to its mobile TV chips.
Market leader in this market remains DibCom from France with Siano Silicon from Israel making inroads. Texas Instruments and Philips are also supposed to be nearing volume production on DVB-H chips, and it was perhaps about time that Infineon made a move. Qualcomm has already leapfrogged many of these by bringing its own MediaFLO/DVB-H multi-standard chip to market already.