MediaPhy's engineering team, based in India, has integrated RF and baseband parts on a single-die, using a 130-nm RF CMOS manufacturing manufacturing process at foundry chip supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. The chip is designed to work with three different mobile TV standards including DVB-H, DVB-T in Europe, Japan's ISDB-T 1, 3, 13 segments and T-DMB/DAB commercialized in Korea. The only other chip vendor that has already rolled out a single-die, RF/baseband mobile TV system-on-chip is Newport Media Inc. (Lake Forest, Calif.). Other leading mobile TV chip companies such as DiBcom SA (Palaiseau, France) and Siano Mobile Silicon (Netanya, Israel) provide such tuner/demodulator combinations in System In Package (SIP) form . MediaPhy, a startup company founded in October 2004, is due to start sampling its chip next month.

While MediaPhy was not present at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) here, competing technology suppliers in search of one big robust mobile TV market over the last 12 months appeared almost weary of yet another chip company claiming to solve the world's mobile TV standards dilemma.

Azzedine Boubguira, vice president of marketing and business development at DiBcom said, "Last fall, I counted almost 40 companies whose businesses touch the mobile TV market. There are a large number of pretenders, wannabes and only a handful of those of us who have real products."

Today, DiBcom, Siano and Newport Media are considered the top three mobile TV chip suppliers on the fledging market.