Portable TV tuner handles terrestrial and mobile

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Apr 25, 2006

A new dual-standard dual-band tuner chip receives and tunes both digital terrestrial TV and mobile broadcast TV signals for portable applications.

Extending its family of ultra-low-power tuners, Microtune has introduced a new dual-standard, dual-band tuner chip that receives and tunes both digital terrestrial TV and mobile broadcast TV signals for portable applications.

When implemented into consumer multimedia devices, the new Mobile MicroTuner MT2266 enables users to access a variety of content - digital TV broadcasts, mobile TV broadcasts, digital radio and teletext - across the digital video broadcast terrestrial (DVB-T) and digital video broadcast handheld (DVB-H) standards.

With power consumption of only 350mW, half that of conventional DVB-T tuners, the MT2266 has minimal impact on the battery life of portable platforms.

Original equipment and original design manufacturers can take advantage of the MT2266 tuner to deliver dual-standard TV capabilities and multimedia features on products as diverse as notebook PCs, USB sticks, PCI Express cards, portable DVB-T receivers, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and personal media players.

The tuner, which supports both the UHF and VHF (Band III) frequency bands, is also ideal for diversity systems, where low power is a critical consideration.

"Our MicroTuner family of high-performance tuners enables digital TV across multiple devices, platforms and standards, and our new MT2266 tuner is an important product addition in meeting the specific performance and power requirements of portable platforms", said James A Fontaine, Microtune President and CEO.

"Our new tuner enables manufacturers to develop cost-optimised portable products that give consumers flexible TV viewing and multimedia options and that deliver superior reception quality and reliability".

"At the same time, they can add this capability without the fear of rapidly draining the battery".

Based on Microtune's silicon tuner architecture, patented technology and power management techniques, the MT2266 is a direct-conversion, single-chip broadband TV tuner engineered to give manufacturers design flexibility and low operating power, at low cost, without compromising high performance.

The MT2266 is optimised for UHF and VHF Band III frequencies with support for the DVB-T and DVB-H standards.

It is engineered to deliver robust performance based on the NorDig Unified and MBRAI specifications.

Measuring only 6 x 6mm in a 40-pin QFN package, the MT2266 contains all active circuitry required to implement a complete radio frequency (RF) to baseband function.

As with other Microtune tuner products, the MT2266 is characterised by a high level of integration that minimises the need for external parts, including the requirement for an external low-noise amplifier, IF saw filters, and transformer balun.

This architecture reduces both total solution cost and the total power budget, while supporting the significantly reduced footprint designs of leading portable device manufacturers.

The MT2266 operates from a 2.7V power supply and consumes as little as 350mW, with multiple power down modes.

Currently sampling with manufacturers, the MT2266 is expected to be in production next quarter.

Reference designs are also expected to be available in Q2 2006 and will accelerate development of consumer end products.

The MT2266 is priced at $5.00 in quantities of 10,000.