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Sharp, Samsung keep eyes on market for mobile TV tuners

  • July 9th, 2007
  • 9:08 am

Sharp has announced that it is talking to about 30 countries about its dual-mode mobile TV chip, the . The company touts the chip as a “world’s first” as it is capable of supporting two rival mobile TV standards used in Europe - DVB-H and T-DMB. Sharp plans to increase its production capacity for the chip to 2 million units a month – up from its current capability of around 300,000 units a month.

However, South Korean electronics giant Samsung also has its eyes fixed on that market and even has products already that can beat Sharp’s offering. It has developed a multi-standard decoder, the S3C4F31, and multi-band RF tuner, S5M8602, chipset which supports multiple digital mobile TV standards. At the time, both chips were among the first to use 65nm processing.

The list of supported standards includes both DVB-H (for mobile phones) and DVB-T (regular digital TV) plus T-DMB. It also includes support for DAB-IP which is used in the UK by Virgin for the Movio service and ISDB-T 1, which is popularly known as One-Seg and is used in Japan. Other rivals watching the market include Freescale, Broadcom and Philips.

 

   
 

Freescale Gives 3G Phones Cellular Makeover

  • June 2nd, 2007
  • 8:35 am

Freescale Semiconductor announces a fourth generation, multimode 3G WCDMA/EDGE cellular RF subsystem. This gives cellphone manufacturers design freedom by shrinking board space 70percent, creating new possibilities for a new breed of slim, elegant 3G handsets. Freescale’s 3G WCDMA/EDGE dual-mode RF cellular subsystem for handsets allows customers a three-to-one component reduction in less than 649 mm2 of board space. The high integration allows manufacturers the ability to add features such as MP3 players, Bluetooth connectivity, digital cameras, DVB-H, and GPS while reducing handset size. Additionally, consumers are expected to enjoy one-third longer talk and standby times over previous generation subsystems. Further, the RF subsystem integrates digital interfacing to the baseband processor for industry-wide compatibility and continues to support emerging standards such as DigRF. DigRF is a global standard of an efficient physical interconnection between baseband and RF integrated circuits for digital cellular terminals. The world’s first fully DigRFcompliant radio for EDGE handsets was introduced by Freescale earlier this year.