Yoram Solomon, the director of strategic marketing, industry and standards and mobile connectivity at Texas Instruments, noted five major design considerations for mobile TV chpsets. “The main requirements are power consumption, low cost, size, multi-path avoidance and Doppler effect cancellations,” Solomon says.
“The last two are reception performance type requirements and they are associated with the fact that you get signals from many different directions and the need to cancel them out,” he says.
Chipsets and mobile TV standards
It’s not easy for chipset makers in the mobile TV business because of the multiplicity of transmission protocols (DVB-H, MediaFLO, DMB, ISDB, etc.) as well as reducing chipset costs. Of course problems of standards and costs for different technologies have affected chipset vendors for decades.
The mobile TV industry could settle on one standard, but that’s not going to happen, at least for the foreseeable future. The Europeans have pretty much settled on DVB-H, in large part because of the European Commission’s (EC) endorsement, but that hasn’t resulted in total unanimity.
For example, Robert Weir, the vice president of sales and marketing at Mirics Semiconductor (that develops mobile TV chips), says in the article, “It’s absolutely unrealistic for the EC to say it’s ‘DVB-H for the whole of Europe.’ What that means is the UK won’t get mobile TV until 2012 because the spectrum won’t be there until digital switchover is completed, whereas mobile TV has already been proven over the DAB network.”
Integration to reduce prices
While proponents battle to promote their favored standard (or standards), mobile chipset manufacturers are trying to continually reduce prices. Azzedine Boubguira, vice president of marketing and business development at semiconductor developer DiBcom, says last year the cost of mobile TV chips was $10 for the bill of materials, but currently it’s less than $7 and continues to decrease.
Lower power chips and integration will result in lower prices, the article notes. Emiliano Sottani, technical marketing manager at Qualcomm CDMA Technologies Europe, says, “Mobile TV devices last summer needed at least three chips to show mobile TV — you had a baseband, a broadcast chip and then an applications processor.
“Right now we have the ability to decode H264 signals on one chip and this helps a lot in reducing the power consumption of the device.”
Less is less
The more complex the chipset the more expensive it is at the outset. Electronics Weekly says, “A good example of this would be, instead of having five RF devices to cope with five radios, devices have a single RF device that copes with multiple radios.
“Or, instead of using RF CMOS, bipolar CMOS or other CMOS technology that costs a lot more to manufacture, employing ‘vanilla’ CMOS, so the same CMOS which is used to make standard components is used to build complex radio components.”
A nice article with new concept of Mobile TV.It is really very good that chipsets will make mobile tv. Now TV becomes more and more entertaining.
Posted by: OLED TV Fan | February 01, 2008 at 01:37 PM