Texas Instruments Announce Design of "Hollywood" Chip for Mobile TV

6th December 2004

Texas Instruments, one of the world's leading silicon chip developers, have announced their intention to design a chip for mobile TV codenamed "Hollywood". The chip will combine the traditional 3-chip solution of RF front-end, demodulation, and channel FEC decoding into a single-chip, and the chip will be able to receive both DVB-H (for the European and US markets) and ISDB-T (for the Japanese market). The RF front-end will be implemented using TI's new digital RF processor (DRP) which, as its name suggests, uses digital technology to implement the RF front-end.

The single-chip solution has the advantages of low power consumption, small board space and low cost.

In a webcast, engineers from TI predict that mobile TV chips will be on 70% of mobile phones as standard, which in a market with 650 million handset sales expected in 2004 would represent 455 million mobile TV-enabled handsets per annum once the systems are rolled-out globally, and mass take-up is predicted to be in 2006 - 2007. Clearly, with volumes that large chip prices will be low, which makes DVB-H an ideal standard for low cost digital radio products as well. DVB-H is also a far superior digital radio system to DAB in terms of its efficiency.