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Singapore, 14 June 2005: Frontier Silicon - the leading fabless manufacturer of semiconductors for mobile digital television (MDTV) and DAB digital radio products - has announced today that it is developing Kino 3, a new multi-standard and multi-band MDTV chip set supporting both the Korean and European digital multimedia broadcast (DMB) as well as the DVB-H standard for mobile TV reception. This will be world's first device to combine a silicon tuner with broad tuning range and a baseband processor utilising software defined radio techniques to address multiple MDTV reception standards - and Kino 3 will compete in terms of cost, size and power consumption with devices that just support a single standard.
Speaking at this week's Broadcast Asia Conference in Singapore, Anthony Sethill, CEO of Frontier Silicon, said, "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. Our aim is therefore to remove this barrier by quickly introducing a solution, and we are on course to introduce our Kino 3 solution in 2006."
DMB is an extension of the Eureka 147 specification commonly known as DAB and used for digital radio broadcasts in much of Europe. DVB-H has been developed as an extension to the existing DVB-T standard which is widely used across Europe for digital TV broadcasts. Both DMB and DVB-H have been developed to provide the robust and high bandwidth data channels required to enable the reliable reception of digital video on handheld devices.
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.
Sethill adds, "With our innovative technology and business models we have already had a big impact on the audio broadcast market with over 70% of all DAB radios using our products. We are now investing heavily in our multi-standard development to ensure that we have a similar impact on the MDTV market."
Details of Frontier Silicon's Kino 3 chip set will be announced in 2006. In outline, it comprises a state-of-the-art multi-standard baseband demodulator/decoder and multi-band (Band II, III, IV, V and L-band) RF tuner IC, and incorporates integrated microcontroller and memory. The extremely low power chip set is expected to consume less than 50mW in DVB-H channel mode.
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