Samsung Electronics Develops DVB-H Chipset with Zero-IF CMOS RF Tuner and SoC Channel Decoder

– Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a leader in advanced semiconductor technology, announced that it has developed a DVB-H (digital video broadcasting for handhelds) front-end chipset that has both a Zero-IF (Intermediate frequency) CMOS (complimentary metal-oxide semiconductor) RF tuner (S5M8600) and a DVB-H/T-compliant (DVB handheld and terrestrial TV standard) channel decoder (S3C4F10) with a CPU and embedded memory.

Samsung's combined solution looms large in today’s DVB-H market, where chipmakers only provide either RF tuner or baseband-channel decoder chips, but not the two combined into a complete solution.

With the Samsung chipset, mobile phone makers entering the DVB-H market can shorten their product development cycle and speed market introduction by foregoing compatibility testing and chip interface adjustments between the radio frequency tuner and the channel decoder.

The DVB-H standard compliant SoC baseband channel decoder (S3C4F10) represents the industry’s first single-chip channel decoder solution, completed with all memories needed for Link Layer operations such as MPE-FEC decoding and IP-Decapsulation.

Samsung's Zero-IF CMOS RF tuner chip (S5M8600) supports DVB-H networks internationally. This enables manufacturers to build handsets for European and U.S. markets using the same tuner and software. For mobile phones targeted to handle planned broadcast TV service in the U.S., the tuner operates in the L-Band (1670-1675 MHz) frequency range. For those targeted at Europe, it also will function within the European UHF frequency range (470-890 MHz) and the L-Band spectrum likely to be allocated for European mobile TV broadcast (1452-1477 MHz).

"With our new chipset, Samsung is quickly assuming market leadership in the rapidly growing mobile phone market for DVB-H standardized broadcasting,” said DoJun Rhee, vice president of Samsung Electronics’ System LSI Division. “We are determined to lead the semiconductor industry in the introduction of highly optimized mobile broadcasting chipset solutions."

Samsung Electronics plans to introduce its dual-mode solution supporting both terrestrial DMB (digital multimedia broadcasting) and DVB-H standards by mid-year 2006.

The global DVB-H market is expected to grow rapidly, from five million units in 2006 to more than 50 million units by 2008.

About Samsung Electronics
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is a global leader in semiconductor, telecommunication, digital media and digital convergence technologies with 2004 parent company sales of US$55.2 billion and net income of US$10.3 billion. Employing approximately 113,000 people in over 90 offices in 48 countries, the company consists of five main business units: Digital Appliance Business, Digital Media Business, LCD Business, Semiconductor Business and Telecommunication Network Business. Recognized as one of the fastest growing brands, Samsung Electronics is the world's largest producer of color monitors, color TVs, memory chips and TFT-LCDs. For more information, please visit www.samsung.com

About DVB-H
Building on the Digital Video Broadcasting Project’s (DVB) DVB-T transmission standard, DVB-H includes the following features for handheld and devices: lower battery consumption, cell identifiers to support quicker signal scanning, frequency handover, and signal strengthening in a mobile environment. This has been achieved by introducing time-slicing for increased power savings, adding COFDM 4K mode reception and MPE-FEC decoding, includign in-depth de-interleaver for additional robustness and mobility, plus delivering signaling enhancements.