Seoul, South Korea (PRWEB) June 6, 2005
Frontier Silicon the leading fabless manufacturer of semiconductors for mobile digital television and DAB digital radio products has announced today that it has started sampling the worlds most advanced terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (T-DMB) chip set in Korea. The companys Apollo 1 RF chip and Kino 1 baseband chip are now sampling with an evaluation board available through the companys local representative BSI.
Speaking at this weeks International T-DMB Conference in Seoul, Anthony Sethill, CEO of Frontier Silicon, said, A majority of local manufacturers have already chosen our chip set for their T-DMB enabled handsets. This is because our technology is proven the underlying RF and baseband technology for Apollo 1 and Kino 1 is also at the heart of over two million chips driving the current explosion in growth of DAB digital radio.
T-DMB is a derivative standard of the Eureka 147 specification commonly known as DAB and used for digital radio broadcasts in much of Europe.
Sethill comments, Because of our success with DAB digital radio in Europe, we were able to assist Korean manufacturers and broadcasters in developing and rolling out T-DMB. Our engineers have been working on Eureka 147 for over 10 years and have in excess of 100 man years of experience in perfecting the silicon and protocol stacks. This is longer than any other group, and we also worked with broadcasters like the BBC in rolling out the DAB standard in the UK. This experience in designing and optimising the technology for this standard has enabled us to launch the most advanced T-DMB chip set available today.
Frontier Silicons T-DMB chip set comprises Apollo 1, the worlds lowest power and smallest footprint RF device; and Kino 1, the lowest power consumption T-DMB baseband chip.
Apollo 1 is the smallest RF tuner for T-DMB currently available, measuring only 0.9mm (H) x 5.0mm (L) x 5.0mm (W), and offers a power consumption better than 80mW, almost one-quarter of competing receivers. The small size and low power consumption make it ideal for designing into mobile handsets intended for digital video broadcasting products.
The introduction of Kino 1 is a significant advance in the evolution of the T-DMB standard, as it provides designers of T-DMB products with a low power solution which is still programmable to meet the changing needs of the T-DMB system. The benefit for the roll out of mobile TV services in Korea is that new requirements can be quickly implemented and devices can reach consumers from the start of commercial broadcasts.
Kino 1 is a highly integrated system-on-chip which can consume as little as 100mW of power and supports a full T-DMB decoding rate over 1.8Mbps. Kino 1 is architected using a mixture of hardware and software blocks to provide the best possible compromise between flexibility, performance and power consumption. The flexibility of the architecture enables the changing requirements of the emerging T-DMB standard to be implemented quickly, thus giving customers a large time to market advantage. To enhance its performance in T-DMB applications Kino 1 integrates a Reed Solomon decoder, which is implemented in hardware rather than software, thereby significantly reducing the power consumption.
About Frontier Silicon
Frontier Silicon is an award-winning company at the forefront of the digital multimedia revolution with a range of semiconductor solutions for mobile digital television, digital TV and digital radio.
The company develops and delivers both the broadcast signal receiver modules and digital processing circuits as individual chips and complete system modules to leading consumer electronics and mobile phone brands.
As a fabless semiconductor business, Frontier Silicon’s core products include complete DAB modules, DVB-T solutions, DMB (digital multimedia broadcasting) solutions, and the underlying system-on-chip (SoC) devices and receiver chips.
Key customers for the company’s products include consumer electronic, automotive entertainment and PDA/mobile phone manufacturers such as Bang & Olufsen, Cambridge Audio, Goodmans, Grundig, Hitachi, Ministry of Sound, Philips, PURE Digital, Roberts Radio, Samsung, Sharp, Sony and TEAC. Frontier Silicon has won a number of awards and its products have also enabled award-winning consumer products. The company’s awards include the Fabless Semiconductor Association’s start-up to watch award, PricewaterhouseCoopers hottest technology company of 2004 award, the World Economic Forum’s technology pioneers to watch 2005, and the Tornado T100 award for one of the best-performing and innovative high-tech private companies. For more information visit http://www.frontier-silicon.com
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