Microtune has announced that LG Electronics has selected Microtune’s Mobile MicroTuner chip to enable high-performance mobile television on LG’s LG-U900 DVB-H mobile phone. LG Electronics, South Korea's second-largest electronics manufacturer, plans to supply the phone to Italian mobile telecommunications service provider, Hutchison 3 Italia.

“As a supplier that specializes in tuners deployed today across leading stand-alone and portable devices, we understand the unique challenges of delivering a quality TV picture in a mobile environment,” said James A. Fontaine, President and CEO of Microtune. “We are pleased to be working with and supporting LG as it brings the first commercial DVB-H mobile phones to market.”

“To compete in the European market, home to worldwide European mobile phone manufacturers, we developed our DVB-H mobile phone to deliver superior quality and reliability,” said Dr. Skott Ahn, Executive Vice President, LG Electronics. “The TV tuner is a key electronics component in ensuring excellent TV performance. We are very pleased to be the world’s first UMTS (WCDMA) DVB-H phone manufacturer deploying Microtune’s market-proven RF technology.” The MicroTuner MT2260 is based on a patent-pending and proprietary architecture, and Microtune’s ClearTune filtering technology. The device features high integration and eliminates bulky and costly external components, such as a low-noise amplifier and transformer. “We pride ourselves on being the performance leader in silicon TV tuner technology,” added Fontaine. “To ensure true quality of reception for DVB-H devices, we designed our Mobile MicroTuner to exceed the MBRAI performance specification. With our vast experience developing tuners that detect very small signals and simultaneously manage fading conditions, 0 dB echos and large adjacent channels, we believe that the MBRAI specification is, at best, a bare minimum requirement for acceptable DVB-H TV reception.”

The Mobile and Portable DVB-T Radio Access Interface Specification (MBRAI) is the DVB-H radio specification defined by the DVB Project, and it identifies the minimum performance condition within which the radio must operate to ensure conformance to the DVB-H standard.

Microtune recently announced that its Mobile MicroTuner technology will be available both as a tuner chip and as a wafer-level chip-scale package. This chip-scale packaged tuner allows for cost-effective integration of the Mobile MicroTuner with a demodulator, filter or other components in a system-in-package (SiP), a solution that will enable greater miniaturization in the next generation of mobile TV products.