James Delahunty
8 Jul 2007 19:21
Sharp has announced that it is talking to about 30 countries about its dual-mode mobile TV chip, the . The company touts the chip as a "world's first" as it is capable of supporting two rival mobile TV standards used in Europe - DVB-H and T-DMB. Sharp plans to increase its production capacity for the chip to 2 million units a month – up from its current capability of around 300,000 units a month.
However, South Korean electronics giant Samsung also has its eyes fixed on that market and even has products already that can beat Sharp's offering. It has developed a multi-standard decoder, the S3C4F31, and multi-band RF tuner, S5M8602, chipset which supports multiple digital mobile TV standards. At the time, both chips were among the first to use 65nm processing.
The list of supported standards includes both DVB-H (for mobile phones) and DVB-T (regular digital TV) plus T-DMB. It also includes support for DAB-IP which is used in the UK by Virgin for the Movio service and ISDB-T 1, which is popularly known as One-Seg and is used in Japan. Other rivals watching the market include Freescale, Broadcom and Philips.
Source:
The Inquirer