Broadcast digital TV can now be delivered into the cell phones while maintaining low cost, long battery life and small form factors. Texas Instruments has announced that initial Hollywood DTV single-chip solutions for mobile phones are now being delivered to TI customers who manufacture wireless handsets. The chips integrate the mobile TV tuner and demodulator into one piece of silicon using a standard 90 nm digital process. Mobile phones with the chips will be on the market in late 2006.

“We’ve moved aggressively to provide consumers with the ability to experience Hollywood in the palm of their hands. The Hollywood design team has made an extraordinary achievement--in less than three days the team was able to get initial silicon working and receiving digital TV content,” said Gilles Delfassy, TI senior vice president and general manager for TI’s Wireless Terminals Business Unit. “Mobile TV is expected to boost 3G adoption, much like camera phones did for the 2.5G market and add significant new revenue to both television broadcasters and mobile phone operators.”

“Broadcast TV to the mobile phone is starting to find market traction worldwide; in order to integrate this function in the cellular handset, the solution needs to be small in form factor, low in power consumption, and low in cost. Typically TV functionality necessitates three individual chips to handle the RF, baseband, and memory portions; but the three constraints mentioned suggest that, vendors that offer an integrated single-chip solution will allow their handset partners a market-leading advantage,” said Alan Varghese, principal analyst at ABI Research.

TI’s first two products in the Hollywood mobile DTV family are the DTV1000 and the DTV1001. Both chips enable mobile TV handsets and services to reach the mass market, and both support open industry standards. Primary standard support includes DVB-H, which is being deployed worldwide including Europe, the United States and parts of Asia. ISDB-T is also supported and is being deployed in Japan. DVB-H and ISDB-T use OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) technology, which provides good spectral efficiency and immunity to multipath to offer improved mobile TV performance.

“Modeo congratulates TI on its continued development of its Hollywood product line, which signals a deep commitment to the mobile television market and is expected to provide a high performance, low cost solution for use in the delivery of quality mobile television and audio content to mobile devices,” commented Michael Schueppert, president of Modeo.

The DTV1000 supports DVB-H operating at 470–750 MHz (UHF) and 1.670–1.675 GHz (L-band) frequency ranges, while the DTV1001 supports ISDB-T one-segment operating at 470–770 MHz frequency range. Through TI’s DRP technology, the Hollywood devices combine a two-chip or system in package (SIP) solution into a single piece of silicon in standard 90-nm digital process to deliver small board area, low power, fast time to market, and high performance.

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