US analog mobile chip specialist Telegent has seen sense and decided to create an ISDB-T analog hybrid chip for Latin America using the SBTVD version (also called ISDB-Tb) which was created from the original Japanese standard especially for Brazil.
Originally Telegent insisted that it was only working on a DVB-T/Analog TV hybrid, but it turns out that was just to deflect attention away from the huge opportunities that all of the mobile TV chip market sees in Latin America. Last time we spoke to Telegent it heavily hinted that it was targeting the DVB-T chip at Europe, but instead this has been sold exclusively in Asian DVB-T markets. Telegent also denied that it saw a future in ISDB-T. But since then 5 or 6 more Latin American countries have embraced ISDB-T, following on from its original implementation in Japan, and the decision 4 years ago by Brazil to select it. Across Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela and Columbia there are around 360 million more people as targets for the technology, to add to the 127 million in Japan, making it one of the most widespread digital TV technologies in the world.
In August chip major Broadcom took the unprecedented step of cutting a pure digital ISDB-T chip for TV set tops in Latin America, along with HD converter boxes, and its own tuner. Chinese mobile TV chip leader Siano Mobile Silicon is expected to enter the market for a mobile TV chip using one of the 13 segments (One Seg) of an ISDB-T signal for mobile only TV and other chip makers too will descend on such a well defined opportunity as soon as their designs are complete.
Freshly public US chip designer MaxLinear has the dominant share of ISDB-T in Japan, with a chip design which was taken on board by most of the Japanese set top makers. So MaxLinear is expecting its fair share of ISDB-T wins in Brazil but so far has announced none. All the Japanese majors such as Panasonic, Murata and MTC, which MaxLinear supplies with chips for Japan, are likely to set up in Brazil, although the chips can’t be absolutely identical ‘ they need to add support for H.264 compression as well as a slightly different in-built interactivity system.
Our guess is that there is going to be an almighty dust up in Latin America, starting about now in Brazil and then the winners there will move on as the other territories roll out transmitters over the years. This puts Telegent in a strong position to say that it is a ‘transitional’ technology from one to the other, from analog to digital.
However the battery life on handsets using its analog TV system has been miserable, since it first generation chips eat around 300 milliwatts (mW) compared with a pure digital system of around 45 to 85 mW aggregate depending on which modulation system we are talking about.
Adding all that digital logic to the chip alongside analog will only make it eat more power. However Telegent also says that it is making strides in power reduction, but omits to say by how much. And if it decides to decode the signal meant for TVs on a phone (the other 12 segments) instead of One seg, then the radio frequencies it has to cover are broader and that will eat yet more power. We understand that it’s offering is purely One Seg though, and analog and One seg programming are very different in Brazil right now. The Telegent announcement doesn’t give us a clue here except to say that the TLG118x is an ISDB-Tb chip which also receives analog TV.
Telegent has now lifted its shipment claims from 50 million that it claimed late last year to 90 million, something we find hard to believe. The company has sold the vast majority of its chips in China and now there are local, highly favored, rivals supplying against it. Telegent permanently pulled its IPO in May, after registering to go public in January. The fact that it did not go through with its public quotation, even though MaxLinear did, has been interpreted as a slowing of its core markets or a reduction of its profitability.
This week Telegent released the TLG1122/23 series which it says delivers improvements in picture quality, bill of material and power usage using 65nm geometry; the TLG121x and TLG123x series which it says deliver dramatic gains in cost and performance by leveraging a revolutionary new architecture and set of algorithms (but there are no details of what these are) and the TLG118x ISDB-Tb/analog TV hybrid and the TLG117x series DVB-T/Analog hybrid which is already shipping. No shipping and price data were offered for any of the chips.