ADI Aims for China Mobile TV Market Gold
By Suzanne Deffree -- EDN, September 4, 2006
Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) is looking to win a gold metal in 2008’s Olympic Games in Beijing and the company is preparing by working toward a more immediate place in the China mobile TV market after a TV broadcasting standard was established last week.
The company has announced a collaboration with its long time partner Legend Silicon Corp., a supplier of silicon solutions for broadband wireless broadcasting, to accelerate the development of mobile TV receivers for China with what ADI claims is the industry's first digital TV standard-compliant receiver solution.
ADI demonstrated the solution for China's newly established terrestrial TV broadcast standard at the International Mobitv Summit & Show 2006 in Shenzhen, on Friday and Saturday. The new digital terrestrial TV broadcasting standard, coded GB 20600-2006, was announced by the Standardization Administration of China on August 30, and will come into effect on August 1, 2007. Legend is the first company to provide a demodulator compliant with the standard, according to ADI.
Coupling demodulators from Legend with low-power RF tuners from ADI's Integrant Technologies, a supplier of mobile TV tuners ADI acquired in July for $127 million, aim to allow customers to quickly integrate digital reception into a range of portable devices, including portable media players, smart phones and laptops.
Based on time domain synchronous - orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (TDS-OFDM) technology, Legend’s demodulator was designed to provide services for both fixed terrestrial high-definition television and mobile broadcasts to provide continuous reception between mobile and fixed applications.
With the standard and technology now in place, Dave Robertson, product line director for ADI's high-speed signal processing group, believes the China mobile TV market will move along quickly.
"In terms of speed of deployment, the way these things typically work is there has to be content available and broadcast available and you have to have devices available for consumers to buy. The broadcast and the content are already up and running in many regions of China for this Chinese standard. It’s been in field trials for now more than a year. All that’s lacking now are the devices. The hope is that this should turn on very quickly,” he said.
The 2008 Olympic Games are expected to propel mobile TV usage in devices like laptops and cell phones in the region, much in the same way the World Cup was expected to propel Europe’s usage of mobile TV.
Said John Hussey, VP of high speed signal processing at ADI, "Initial rollout will begin in set-top boxes, automobiles and televisions, followed soon after by high-end PDAs, smart phones and portable media players. By 2008, the total market size of mobile TV applications in China is expected to be upwards of tens of millions of units. Ultimately the technology will be adapted for mass-market mobile phones."
The joint demonstration platform meets the low-power, performance and time-to-market requirements that will be needed to support digital reception in portable platforms, ADI said. Battery efficiency, small form factors and lower-cost solutions are allowed by the Integrant RF tuner, which will support mobile extensions and applications of the Chinese digital broadcast standard, ADI added, noting that it teamed with Legend for its second-generation silicon to handle the demodulation of digital broadcasts. ADI is also leveraging its Blackfin processor to perform the MPEG-2 decoding and multimedia processing functions in mobile TV applications.
