LONDON -- Digital audio broadcast and terrestrial TV chip specialist Frontier Silicon is developing a multi-standard and multi-band chip set that will support the competing specifications for delivering TV signals to mobile phones.

The company says its Kino 3 device, integrating a tuner and baseband SoC, could be the first to work on both the Korean and European digital multimedia broadcast (DMB) as well as the DVB-H standard.

Full details of the device will not be revealed till next year, but Frontier Silicon (Watford, England) says it would combine a multi-standard baseband demodulator/decoder and multi-band (Band II, III, IV, V and L-band) RF tuner IC, with an integrated microcontroller and memory on chip.

It says the low power chip set is expected to consume less than 50mW in DVB-H channel mode.

The tuner being designed will have a broad range and the baseband processor will use software defined radio techniques to address multiple MDTV reception standards. The company suggests the Kino 3 will compete in terms of cost, size and power consumption with devices that just support a single standard.

Such parts are being developed by major chip companies such as Texas Instruments, Philips Semiconductors and Freescale, as well as specialist fables groups such as DiBcom and Truespan Inc.

The development was revealed by Frontier Silicon's CEO Anthony Sethill Tuesday (June 14) at this week's Broadcast Asia Conference in Singapore.

However, Frontier said earlier this year when it closed a $28 million venture capital investment round that it would use the bulk of the money to increase its presence in the emerging mobile digital television sector. The company already claims to have a 70 percent share of the market for DAB digital radio receiver chips.

"We strongly believe that regulatory, spectrum allocation and installed infrastructure issues could considerably slow down the deployment of MDTV worldwide. With our experience in developing pioneering semiconductor solutions for digital broadcasting, we recognised this as a company early on and deployed resources to develop multi-standard ICs," said Sethill.

Last month, another specialist supplier of DAB chips, RadioScape, raised serious concerns about the technical and commercial viability of using Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld (DVB-H) technology for delivering multimedia services to mobile handsets, suggesting that the alternate Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) technology favoured by carriers in the Far East is superior.

Commercial MDTV services based on DMB are expected to roll out in Korea during 2005 and in the UK and Germany in 2006. Commercial services based on DVB-H will go live in USA during 2006 and parts of Europe will also adopt this standard during 2006 and 2007.