Abstract

The development of mobile TV terminal device is still in its early stages, and there are many problems that have yet to be overcome. The four main difficulties that mobile phone vendors face on the technology side are as follows:

1. The question of how to improve terminal device portability; reducing power consumption is the best way to achieve this goal.

2. The need to improve receiver sensitivity. Possible solutions here include optimizing the C/N (Carrier to Noise) ratio, reducing attenuation, boosting noise tolerance and minimizing the echo effect.

3. The question of how to maintain high image quality when the user is traveling at high speed.

4. To achieve successful commercialization, not only will terminal devices need to be made smaller, vendors will also have to develop multi-band capability and achieve more flexibility in bandwidth utilization.

As regards future development trends of mobile TV IC technology, tuners will need to be able to cope with a wider range of UHF frequency bands, and be able to produce OFDM signals. To reduce the power consumption and the size of TV-enabled mobile phones, vendors will need to adopt silicon tuners, or use direct conversion Zero-IF architecture to cut the number of components and reduce electricity consumption. Vendors can be expected to start integrating the demodulator with the tuner to create a SoC or SiP solution; mobile TV IC solutions will also be expected to support more than one mobile TV standard. The trend in processor architecture will be towards separate communication and application processors, or else to use proprietary multimedia processors or hardware accelerators to improve processing speed.

Although the mobile TV market does appear to offer significant business opportunities, commercialization of mobile TV service may not begin to take off until after 2007. It is generally anticipated that DVB-H and DMB will be the mainstream mobile TV standards. DVB-H has the support of several leading mobile phone vendors - including Nokia and Motorola - as well as leading IC suppliers such as TI, Freescale, Intel, and Philips. However, as DVB-H networks operate independently of the existing broadcasting and 3G networks, mobile operators may be reluctant to adopt this standard. DMB, which evolved out of the European DAB standard, is already in widespread use in Europe, but its development is being held back by the fact that relatively few vendors offer DMB IC solutions.

Many companies - including TI, Philips and Samsung - have already launched mobile TV IC solutions that support the DVB-H standard. In order to develop a more comprehensive product line and under the consideration of market demand, vendors are now beginning to flesh out their product lines by developing solutions to support DMB and ISDB-T as well. Although DVB-H still has a slight lead over the other standards, IC suppliers are being careful not to place all their eggs in one basket. The most likely scenario is that vendors will focus on providing support for both DVB-H and DMB standards.

Appendix

List of Companies