Hot on the heels of Israeli chip designer Siano Mobile Silicon, Legend Silicon, a chip design business which straddles the US silicon valley and a Beijing based Research Center at Tsinghua University, said this week it is ready to deliver not one, but two mobile TV chips for the Chinese market and multiple DMB-TH digital TV chips.
Legend’s claim to fame is that it has contributed intellectual property to the underlying signaling in the Chinese digital TV standard, specifically the Time Domain Synchronous – Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (TDS-OFDM) basic carrier technology. The mobile TV system is called CMMB STiMi and doesn’t use the same types of carriers, but more like traditional coded OFDM, which is used in all the other major mobile TV technologies.
STiMi hails from the R&D arm of SARFT itself and stands for satellite and terrestrial interactive multimedia. It is supports 8 MHz bandwidth slices and offers data rates up to 12 Mbps. More or less the same as DVB-H. But China will use this system both with a 2.6 GHz satellite signal, which will cut in during late 2008, and three 8 MHz channels in 700 MHz spectrum, the network for which are being built in China’s biggest 40 biggest cities in time for the Olympics this Summer.
That system will offer 9 free to air channels with advertising until April but by 2009 this will shift to 25 pay TV channels with 5 free to air channels.
So to some extent Legend is really chasing the 2009 network build of the Chinese digital TV network, and has rushed after the mobile TV service as something of an afterthought.
Legend unveiled a range of terrestrial TV chips aimed at TVs, set tops, automobile receivers as well for portable devices, presumably with a battery usage pattern something like a laptop.
The company talks about the GB20600-2006 standard, which it calls the China Digital Television Terrestrial Broadcasting (DTTB) standard, which we understand to be the combination of both the digital terrestrial DMB-TH TV and the STiMi mobile TV, and it appears to have a number of chips that can see both signals and offering low power including the LGS-8GL5.
However its true mobile chips are the LGS-8GA6 and the LGS-8GS6, the first built with the help of Analog Devices and incorporating its silicon tuner and memory for time de-interleaving (so it can work with timesliced signals which preserve battery life). The second chip combines the Legend demodulator with Sharp Corporation’s silicon tuner for the time de-interleaving. This device is even more low power than the first and is really the one aimed at mobile handsets, while it looks like the Analog Device partnership may have produced a cheaper chip which requires a little more battery, like a dedicated portable TV device.
‘Eight years of research, chip development and close work with the China standards body has paid off,’ said Dr. Lin Yang, co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer of Legend Silicon. ‘We have collaborated with broadcasters, broadcast equipment makers and consumer electronics manufacturers to ensure a smooth migration to digital television in advance of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Not only does our advanced technology meet the needs of terrestrial solutions, like televisions and set-top boxes, it also provides solutions for bringing digital broadcast television content to mobile devices.’
Legend said it has secured design wins with nearly every major TV manufacturer and set top builder that wants to target the Chinese market, and says its products are being designed into a variety of mobile devices.
The company said that China currently has about 380 million households, and 520 million cellular handsets. Mobile TV devices are being prepared as a purely consumer electronics retail propositions, and are not being carried by the two major Chinese cellular operators, China Mobile and China Unicom. That’s a situation that is likely to leave many of the early mobile TV devices as non-handset devices.
Israeli chip designer Siano Mobile Silicon last month announced a deal to supply the aigo brand of MP3 players, owned by Huaqi, with mobile TV chips for the Chinese market and said it was in the process of helping it define user interfaces and EPG look and feel, ahead of the new chip being available.
The aigo brand of MP3 players has around 35% market share in China, Siano claims, and it should be among the first to market with a mobile TV player. Other chip players, apart from Legend and Siano, that are leading in the market are entirely local Chinese manufacturers as far as we know, and so far none of the chip heavyweights such as Texas Instruments or Qualcomm have addressed the Chinese STiMi mobile TV system, although they may be working in secret, as may have Philips or DVB-H chip leader DiBcom.