Chrontel, Freescale, STMicroelectronics and a trio from the Netherlands presented papers on tuners for various mobile TV standards.

Three entities from the Netherlands — Semiconductor Ideas to the market (ItoM) BV, Eindhoven University of Technology and the University of Twente — presented a paper on a single-chip TV receiver, dubbed the universal mobile television (UMTV) device.

Targeted for PDAs, PCs and cellular phones, the UMTV is a low-cost, 8-GHz device based on a BiCMOS process. The device is a multi-standard receiver for all analog and digital TV standards, such as PAL, NTSC, SECAM, DVB-H, among others, according to the companies.

The device claims to be better suited for these markets than current silicon tuners. Existing products are power-hungry devices that still require more than 15 external components.

In contrast, the UMTV is a single-chip solution, with a power dissipation of 150mW. Measuring 25-mm², the 3-volt device includes a low-noise amplifier, quadrature oscillator, a digital AFC and a programmable high-precision filter, with a dynamic image compression (DIS) unit that implements the IF filter.

In another effort to address the power issues, Chrontel Inc. described a TV tuner/demodulator IC with digital image rejection — based on a 0.25-micron CMOS process. Measuring 6- x 6-mm², a prototype chip has been developed that consumes only 1-Watt of power from a 2.5-volt supply.

The device makes use of dual-conversion, low-IF architecture and implements all tuner/demodulator functions such as channel filtering, in-band image rejection and video/sound demodulation digitally.

Another vendor, STMicroelectronics Inc., described a complete DVB-T tuner chip — based on a 0.13-micron CMOS process. The architecture is based on a double-conversion, zero intermediate-frequency (DZIF) scheme.

The receive chain includes the VCO, PLL, voltage regulators and an ADC. The number of external components are "minimized to the 27-MHz crystal, an input balun transformer, SAW filter, loop filters, decoupling capacitors and bias resistances.

Taking a different approach, Freescale Semiconductor Inc. presented a paper at ISSCC on a direct-conversion receiver for the DVB-H standard. The low-power UHF tuner IC is implemented in a 0.35-micron process, based on silicon germanium with carbon (SiGe:C) BiCMOS technology.

To boost performance, a direct down-conversion from the RF band to the baseband via zero-IF techniques is used. The device includes several circuit blocks: broadband LNA, dual quadrature mixer, post-mixer amplifier, multiple bandwidth baseband filiter, VCO, PLL, among others.