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.

Broad opportunity
Ironi emphasized that the power consumption is a key attribute, although this required finding a compromise between hard-wiring for power efficiency and programmability for flexibility. “The SMS1000 is mainly hard-wired with some programmability to allow for evolution of standards,” Ironi said. He confirmed that Siano had licensed and included a processor core with from ARC International plc (Elstree, England) on the demodulator (see April 19 story).

The demodulator chip handles error correction layers and channel separation processing on its own, without overloading the host processor. Equipped with flexible embedded interfaces such as SPI, USB, SDIO, and a set of device drivers, the SMS1000 makes the design-in of mobile digital TV function simple, Siano said.

Ironi declined to say where Siano is getting its samples made, but admitted that one foundry is being used for the digital CMOS and another for the RF CMOS. “The RF chip required accurate characterization of process,” said Ironi indicating that the company had gone to a known foundry supplier of RF CMOS.

Ironi said Siano, although only a little over a year old had already built up contacts with leading mobile phone makers as potential customers. “We’re focusing on the mobile phone market for now. We’re working with ‘tier one’ mobile phone makers and top tier module makers,” Ironi said before stressing that mobile digital television would eventually have a very broad impact and end up being added to most pieces of portable equipment and transportable equipment, such as automobiles.

“We see handsets supporting mobile television in the second-half of 2006. The tier one makers are heading there very aggressively. A lot of places are moving quickly from trials in fall 2005 to pilot services in 2006.”

“The opportunity for chipset makers is wider than wireless LAN or Bluetooth,” Ironi said, pointing out that many pieces of equipment from mobile phones to notebook computers and on to automobiles would be suitable to digital television reception.

Commercial deployment of terrestrial mobile digital TV is expected to start in South Korea in November 2005, in Japan in March or April of 2006 and in Europe, southeast Asia and the U.S. later in 2006. “I think that during the 2007 market ramp we will see the chip set cost move down below the $10 price point,” Ironi added.