Siano lays claim to lowest power mobile TV chipset

Low power television
LONDON — Israeli startup Siano Mobile Silicon Ltd. has said it has started sampling its first product, a multi-standard mobile digital television receiver chipset, which has lower power consumption than competitors' products.

The company, founded by executives from DSP Group, Emblaze Semiconductor, Infineon, Metalink, Motorola, Savan Communications, STMicroelectronics and Zoran Corp. in June 2004, has produced a quad-band, two-chip receiver intended for use in multiple equipment types including mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs, lap-top and notebook PCs, portable media players, portable DVD players, portable game consoles.

The SMS1000 chip set consists of a quad-band zero-intermediate frequency CMOS RF tuner (SMS1001) and a multi-standard demodulator (SMS1002), which supports DVB-H, DVB-T, DAB, Enhanced Packet Mode DAB and T-DMB mobile digital TV standards.

When processing DVB-H, the chipset consumes less than 25-milliwatts, which Siano (Netanya, Israel) claims is the industry’s lowest power consumption figure for the combination of a tuner and a demodulator. Competitive offerings when measured on a comparable basis are at about 40-mW to 45-mW, according to Alon Ironi, Siano's chief executive officer.

“We are offering a complete solution of RF tuner and demodulator as separate chips or as a system-in-package. And it requires almost no external components; no SAW filters, no LNA, no synthesizer and no external memory,” he said. Ironi said that just about the only external components required for the TV function would be a passives network between an antenna and the RF tuner to help pick off the frequency band of the particular standard in use.

“Developing the architecture of the SMS1000, we leveraged our experience with the mobile phone industry, and took the standpoint of a phone or PDA designer,” said Ironi. “System cost, battery life, reception performance, and design cycle duration are the factors that matter most to our customers, and the SMS1000 is optimized in all these aspects,” Ironi added.