Product category:
Communications ICs (Wireless)
News Release from: Microtune | Subject: MicroTuner MT2130
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 20 November 2006
Low-power tuner has all TV standards
covered
Tuner chip brings quality digital TV to PC notebooks, portable TVs, tuner sticks, portable DVD players and other small devices that demand both high performance and lower power.
Expanding its portfolio of products for the emerging portable digital TV market, Microtune has announced a new tuner chip that brings quality digital TV to PC notebooks, portable TVs, tuner sticks, portable DVD players and other small devices that demand both high performance and lower power Called the MicroTuner MT2130, the new tuner, when integrated into portable consumer products, allows users to watch analogue and digital TV across cable or off-air broadcasts, to time-shift programmes and to capture video for multimedia applications
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 25 Sep 2002 at 8.00am (UK)
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The market leader in single-chip silicon TV tuner technology, Microtune develops radio frequency (RF) silicon and systems products targeted to digital TVs, set-top boxes, cable modems and telephony modems, PC-TV products, car entertainment systems and mobile TV devices.
With more than 42 million TV tuner chips sold worldwide, Microtune technology is both customer-hardened and market-proven.
It is backed by high-volume manufacturing and worldwide engineering and application support services.
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"The worldwide transition to digital television is increasingly spanning a widening range of consumer electronics and peripherals", said James A Fontaine, Microtune's President and CEO.
"Our new MT2130 leverages the superior engineering, excellent performance and reliability that have come to characterise Microtune tuners, and it adapts our market-proven RF technology for new classes of power-sensitive digital TV devices".
"By deploying the MT2130 chip, our customers can differentiate their portable products by offering superior TV reception across the analogue and digital broadcasts that exist today".
Microtune's new MT2130 is based on the architecture of the company's very high-performance three-in-one tuner - the MT2131 analogue/digital/cable tuner, the only silicon TV tuner engineered to meet and exceed the US digital receiver performance parameters of the ATSC standard.
The MT2130 offers the dramatic integration, broad-based functionality and reduced bill-of-materials advantages of the MT2131, but with 20% lower power.
Based on its real-world experience with mobile and PC-TV tuner applications, Microtune designed the MT2130 to meet the specific RF technical requirements of power-sensitive, space-constrained products.
First, the MT2130 is engineered with excellent sensitivity to receive weak signals and to compensate for the small, built-in antennas typical of portable products.
Like its MT2131 predecessor, the MT2130 exceeds, by a wide margin, the sensitivity-measurement tests published by the FCC this past December in its study of a large group of retail DTV receivers.
For the consumer, the chip's superior sensitivity translates directly into uncompromised picture quality.
Second, the MT2130 deploys Microtune's unique ClearTune filtering technology to improve channel reception.
Television bands worldwide are becoming increasingly congested with the simulcasting of legacy analogue transmissions and new digital channels.
Competing or undesired adjacent channels are now frequently encountered, causing disruption to both analogue and digital signals.
Microtune's patent-pending ClearTune technology, built into the MT2130, provides significant immunity to these interfering signals.
From a consumer perspective, the MT2130 tuner is engineered to minimise noise and distortion for consistent, stable picture quality.
The MT2130 tuner packs the functionality of three tuners (analogue, digital terrestrial, cable) into a miniature device, eliminating numerous external components for a very cost-effective design.
The chip supports multiple TV transmission standards (ATSC, QAM, DVB-T, ISDB-T, DMB-T, NTSC, Pal and Secam).
As a result, it permits manufacturers to deploy the same tuner on multiple platforms, gaining economies of scale, while providing a single solution that cost-effectively bridges the multiple analogue and digital TV standards that co-exist today.
At a mere 0.25in in size, the MT2130 chip fits into very small designs, such as dongle or Flash-stick packages, and can be easily configured in multituner architectures.
Multituner architectures enable diversity applications and permit users to enable watch and record two or more channels simultaneously.
The MT2130 tuner is sampling now to select customers and is priced at less than $3.00 in volume quantities.
To simplify evaluation and design for qualified customers, Microtune offers evaluation boards.
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