Kit puts mobile TV chipset to the test

A complete evaluation kit will allow designers to explore the capabilities of the latest mobile TV chipset from Frontier Silicon.

Frontier Silicon, the market leader in semiconductor solutions for mobile TV and digital radio, has introduced a complete evaluation kit which will allow designers to explore the capabilities of its mobile TV chipset.

The kit, named Troy, contains: Frontier Silicon's Apollo RF receiver and Kino 2 chipset for mobile TV applications; software and documentation allowing a PC to act as the host processor in a mobile TV system, displaying up to four video streams simultaneously as well as dynamically configuring and monitoring various parameters; flexible interfacing to all the leading media processors; plus all necessary cables and documentation.

The Troy kit allows developers to test and measure the performance of Frontier Silicon's mobile TV chipset in lab and real-life situations, and is fully configurable through a USB interface.

It receives a T-DMB RF signal on Band III and L Band, and delivers an MPEG-2 transport stream to a host processor for audio and video decoding.

Troy can process up to four simultaneous T-DMB streams, each displayed in a separate player window on the PC; the streams can be started and stopped using the AV control area's play and stop buttons.

Once evaluation is complete using the PC, a flexible media processor connector enables easy interfacing to media and application processor development kits, allowing quick mobile TV reference platform development.

The kit supports dual-band multimode operation - Band-III, L-Band for T-DMB, eDMB, DAB-IP - and the software includes T-DMB decoder object code and reference PC utility source code.

The SPI-USB bridge included allows a standard PC to act as the host processor, and the interface connector also contains serial SPC, GPIO and I2S signals.

The media processor connector supports multiple supply voltages enabling connection to all popular media processor development kits.

The Apollo RF receiver and Kino2 baseband processor IC chipset provides mobile TV handset manufacturers with maximum flexibility to easily customise their products to meet the needs of their customers and offer high quality TV and radio services.

Apollo is the smallest low power RF tuner for T-DMB currently available.

It measures just 5.0 x 5.0 x 0.9mm, supports Band-III, Band II and L-Band reception, features market leading ultra-low power consumption of less than 80mW and requires fewer than 20 external passive components.

Kino 2 delivers significant improvements in size, power consumption and cost compared with other IC solutions available today, resulting in longer battery life and reduced system size to enable mobile TV in smaller, slimmer phones.

The chip consumes as little as 80mW of power and supports a full decoding rate of over 1.8Mbit/s The Kino 2 IC is a true multimode device with built in flexibility through software customisation, supporting all T-DMB variants as well as DAB and DAB-IP in a single chip.

Its flexibility enables advanced software features such as conditional access and data services.

When combined with the multiband capability of the Apollo silicon tuner, handset vendors can produce mobile TV featured devices that are compatible with the requirements of all T-DMB markets worldwide including China, Korea and Germany.

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