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Frontier Silicon launches world's smallest RF tuner for mobile digital television

New Apollo chip measures a compact 5 x 5 mm and offers lowest power consumption for implementation in receiver modules for mobile phones

London, 14th February 2005: Frontier Silicon - the leading fabless manufacturer of semiconductors for digital radio, TV and mobile TV products - has launched its first tuner chip for digital multimedia broadcasting (T-DMB) applications. The new Apollo chip is a state-of-the-art RF front-end device that enables Frontier Silicon to offer a complete low-cost solution for audio, video and data broadcasting to mobile phones and other mobile devices when combined with the company's Kino T-DMB digital baseband processor.

Details of Apollo's underlying technology platform, suitable for delivering T-DMB as well as future DVB-H products, were presented for the first time last week at the ISSCC conference in San Francisco. The tuner chip will be demonstrated in a live terrestrial DMB (T-DMB) solution at the 3GSM World Congress this week (hall 5, stand M53, Cannes, France).

Apollo is the smallest RF tuner for T-DMB currently available, measuring only 0.9mm (H) x 5mm (L) x 5mm (W), and offers a power consumption better than 80mW, almost one-quarter of competing receivers. The small size and low power consumption make it ideal for designing into mobile handsets intended for T-DMB (digital video broadcasting) products. A power save feature in Apollo allows the receiver to be put in standby, bringing the average power consumption down to 50mW; this capability is enabled through a software feature in the digital baseband T-DMB chip.

In designing Apollo, Frontier Silicon's design engineers overcame the major challenge in designing a zero IF receiver, DC offsets. A near-zero IF architecture combines the robust reception of traditional superheterodyne receivers with the high integration of direct conversion zero IF. Apollo has three separate low noise amplifiers at its front end for L band, band 3 and band 2. These are multiplexed into a common automatic gain control (AGC) amplifier and mixers to produce a near-zero IF of 1.024MHz; this results in the image response being put in the adjacent channel, reducing the image rejection required. After on-chip filtering and up-conversion to the industry standard 2.048 MHz IF, the signal amplitude is adjusted and fed to the baseband chip.

The Apollo chip is manufactured in a 0.35µm SiGe BiCMOS process to give low power consumption with excellent performance over the -45° to 85°C temperature range. The chip is available now.

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Editor's notes: About Frontier Silicon

Frontier Silicon is an award-winning company at the forefront of the digital multimedia revolution with a range of semiconductor solutions for mobile digital television, digital TV and digital radio. The company develops and delivers both the broadcast signal receiver modules and digital processing circuits as individual chips and complete system modules to the leading consumer electronics and mobile phone brands.

As a fabless semiconductor business, Frontier Silicon's core products include complete DAB modules, DVB-T solutions, DMB (digital multimedia broadcasting) solutions, and the underlying system-on-chip (SoC) devices and receiver chips. Key customers for the company's products include consumer electronic, automotive entertainment and PDA/mobile phone manufacturers such as Bang & Olufsen, Cambridge Audio, Goodmans, Grundig, Hitachi, Ministry of Sound, Philips, PURE Digital, Roberts Radio, Samsung, Sharp, Sony and TEAC. Frontier Silicon has won a number of awards and its products have also enabled award-winning consumer products. The company's awards include the Fabless Semiconductor Association's start-up to watch award, PricewaterhouseCoopers hottest technology company of 2004 award, the World Economic Forum's technology pioneers to watch 2005, and the Tornado T100 award for one of the best-performing and innovative high-tech private companies.