Siano Mobile Silicon has launched a mobile digital TV (MDTV) receiver chip, the SMS118X, targeting China's domestic mobile TV market. The chip, scheduled to debut in handheld consumer applications at the Olympics Games this summer, supports the Chinese MDTV standard, CMMB.
CMMB (or S-TIMI) is a technology developed in China and selected by the State Administration for Radio, Film & Television (SARFT) as the main platform for delivering TV services to mobile devices. The CMMB network will use both satellite and terrestrial signals, to obtain effective coverage both in densely populated cities, including indoor reception, as well as in sparsely populated rural areas.
There are two optional configurations to the CMMB chip: the SMS1185 supports antenna diversity -- on one single chip -- for both the terrestrial UHF signal and the satellite S-band signal. That is, the single chip can be connected to two UHF antennas and two S-band antennas, for maximum performance. The lower cost SMS1180 supports only one antenna per each spectrum band.
Both solutions are claimed to exhibit high sensitivity, satisfactory mobility performance, low power consumption and high level of component integration. Recently conducted field trials in the major Chinese cities are claimed to have shown a clear performance advantage of the SMS118X over competing solutions.
The SMS118X supports reception and display of multiple TV channels in parallel. In addition, it includes two complete, distinct UHF and S-band paths, strong baseband processor for the challenging performance requirements and also all the common interfaces required for the consumer market -- USB, SDIO, SPI, memory-mapped, transport stream and I2C. The device does not require any external active component such as memory, to support CMMB.
Samples of the SMS118X are now available, with volume production starting in August.
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