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27.11.2006
Mobile TV comes of age
The value chain of mobile
TV is starting to coming together, but there are still very
different approach to providing streaming video to a
handset. Nick Flaherty reports.
The market for mobile TV is potentially huge, with tens of
millions of units predicted to ship in the next few years.
Semiconductor giants and startups are all eyeing the market
for chips to receiver broadcast TV on mobile phones, but
A flexible solution for all the different standards – from
DVB-H, T-DMB and IP DAB in Europe, to DVB-H and MediaFLO in
the US and T-DMB, IP DAB and other standards in Asia – is
desirable to allow handset makers to have one platform that
they can easily modify for the different markets.
While DVB-H commercial services are now in Italy and Germany
and Spain will follow next year, and the Lobster service
starting in the UK from virgin Mobile and BT Movio using
IP-DAB, there are also issues of spectrum allocation across
Europe.
But there are other ways to provide mobile TV. IP Wireless
in Chippenham has been developing a system based on the TDMA
technology that allows operators to use their existing
spectrum to provide broadcast TV services to handsets via an
extra modem in the PC or handset. That technology is rolling
out across Japan this month and is being trialled by Orange,
Vodafone and O2 in Bristol.
“The key driver is cost,” said Roger Nichol, vice president
of technology at IP Wireless. “In Europe operators are
really starting to get behind this as a viable way to
deliver the same capabilities they do over their unicast
networks.”
Vodafone also is looking to use its 3G network for video
rather than broadcast technologies, and mainly for business
reasons. It needs to recoup its investment in 3G spectrum,
but needs new technologies in handsets outside of the mobile
TV chips, and want to link video to its other broadband and
Internet services, both on the handset and in the home.
Reconfigurable receiver
For mobile broadcast TV, Mirics Semiconductor has developed
a reconfigurable radio chip that can handle all the mobile
TV formats in the world. But as a small company it has to be
clever and work with other suppliers in the handset supply
chain in order to grow, says CEO Simon Atkinson.
“The mobile broadcast market is extremely fragmented by
multiple standards and band allocations,” he said. “To date,
companies have typically focused on supporting one or two of
the multitude of standards. This fragmentation has been
identified as the principal bottleneck to the wider adoption
of mobile broadcast technologies; the small volumes
available for any handset supporting a single standard do
not justify its development.”
“The multi-standard TV tuner has been heralded as the 'holy
grail ambition' for mobile handset design and is a key
development target for our competitors for the next 12
months. Unlike our competitors, Mirics is delivering this
technology today, in the form of working silicon which is
available to sample now,” he said. “The MSI001 supports all
current digital terrestrial broadcast standards, and
analogue radio, across all terrestrial broadcast bands. It
also has the lowest cost implementation and highest
performance of any mobile broadcast receiver currently
available.”
The MSI001 is initially aimed at consumer digital DAB + FM
radio receivers and video on mobile phones. As it is
reconfigurable, it changes the receiver architecture - from
direct conversion to superhetereodyne to dual conversion
superhet – depending on the frequency and the protocol.
The BiCMOS chip is being made by Jazz Semiconductor in a
0.35um process, and so can be priced at $3.50 in low
volumes, making it comparable to the price of FM radio chips
in cell phones today.
Sony has been at the forefront of chip design at it's
Basingstoke centre, and has developed its own DVB-H chips
for Sony-Ericsson and the open market. Chris Clifton,
director of wireless at Sony Semiconductor sees battery life
as the key problem, particularly as the mobile TV is added
to several other radio technologies in the handset such as
WiFi and Bluetooth.
“All this is making it very difficult for the battery to
cope,” he said. “A mixed signal tuner is more challenging
from a power point of view and that's than opportunity for
us, particularly in the power amplifier design.”
He points to recent trails that have shown that a
substantial amount of mobile TV viewing happens in the home
where reception is not as good, so improving the link margin
on the radio front end is vital. Systems that do not have an
external antenna sea 5dB drop in margin, and having multiple
antennas close together inside the handset can cause another
10 to 15dB drop, and all this leads to reduction in the
battery life and the talk time as more power is needed to
maintain the link.
Neil Johnson, principal engineer at the mobile multimedia
business unit of Broadcom, pointed to the opportunities for
the applications processor. Broadcom, which has its set top
box chip design in Bristol and the video chip design in
Cambridge, is building up its teams in both locations for
mobile TV, and it is the system design that is important –
the size of the screen, how the channels change, how all the
different service are access. This is key for the
applications processor.
“Developing demodulators and tuners is expensive and slow
and will soon become commoditised into a single chip
solution,” he said. “I believe the differentiation are the
usability, connectivity and social networking, and the user
interface design is critical for the success of the
product.”
Frontier Semiconductor has launched the industry’s first
single chip that handles both major mobile TV standards in
both the baseband and the RF, ahead of established players
such as Texas Instruments and starts such as Siano and
Newport Media.
Frontier is the major supplier of T-DMB chips into Korea,
and its Paradiso single chip handles both the DVB-H and T-DMB
standards using the UCC digital signal processor from
Imagination Technologies. This is scheduled for mass
production in 2008, says Mark Hopgood, mobile TV business
development manager. “TV has to get into the mass market,
mid range ‘fashion’ phones to be successful so we get more
flexibility by mopping up everything in the front end
[chip],” he said.
“There may be a market for a portable player that has all
the different standards loaded but for handsets we are
looking more at a common platform where different software
loads give different functions,” he said.
DibCom has also launched a new version of its digital
terrestrial DVB-T chip for lower cost applications, and sees
cost optimisation for different markets, rather than a
single chip solution, as more important. “This is for three
different reasons," said Yanick Levy, CEO Of DiBcom. “The
basebands are different because there is different price
pressure in the different markets and we want to be the most
cost effective,” he said.
“We are already driven by cost but at this point we think
this is the best cost because the baseband is still quite
large compared to the RF so it better to shrink that alone.
At some point, perhaps in 08 there will be a system on a
chip but not at this point,” he said.
“I would challenge any fixed function architecture in size
and power consumption against ours,” said Hossein Yossaie,
CEO of Imagination Technologies which licenses designs to
other chip makers. “Yes, if you do these things with a big
digital signal processor then yes, I agree, there is
overhead to programmability. But if you design a
programmable demodulator that can reuse resources such as
memory more efficiently, particularly in complex standards,
then there is no overhead.”
Integrating the modem into the applications processor is
still good, he says. “We are talking to almost all the
applications chip makers, and in 90nm our demodulator is
less than 5mm sq as it uses the system memory. At 65nm its
less than 3mm sq, so I don’t see what all the fuss is about
with a fixed function device.”
US startup Newport Media is also planning a single chip in
2008 for DVB-H and T-DMB, as is another start up, Siano,
while TI is upgrading its Hollywood single chip to add T-DMB
to DVB-H.
Streaming, not broadcast
But the world’s largest phone operator, Vodafone, sees more
potential in streaming video to phones over the 3G network,
rather than broadcast. It worries about the broadcasters
getting revenue directly from the ads on the video service,
bypassing the phone operator who, after all, has subsidised
the phone.
So it is using the new HSDPA and HSUPA technologies for
streaming video to handsets and combining this with internet
access, access to other videos such as YouTube and other
broadband services, says Steve Harrop, technical architect
for Vodafone's mobile applications and content services.
The component suppliers see a battle ahead. “I think there
is going to be this ongoing battle between the Asian handset
makers adding features and the operators,” said Simon
Atkinson, CEO of Mirics Semiconductor.
Source: Engineer Live
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