China : Leading mobile TV chip maker Siano Mobile Silicon announced the official launch of its new Mobile Digital TV (MDTV) receiver chip, the SMS118X, targeting China's domestic mobile TV market. 

The chip, scheduled to debut in hand-held consumer applications at the Olympics Games this summer, supports the Chinese MDTV standard – CMMB.

CMMB (or S-TIMI) is the technology developed in China and selected by the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) as the main platform for delivering TV services to mobile devices. The CMMB network will use both satellite and terrestrial signals, to obtain effective coverage both in densely populated cities, including indoor reception, as well as in sparsely populated rural areas.

The pilot launch of mobile TV in China, broadcasted in more than 30 cities over a UHF spectrum band, will be at the Olympic Games in August this year. Full commercial deployment, including satellite transmission and conditional access system, is scheduled for early 2009, prior to the Chinese New Year. 

"We are delighted to have Siano launch its high performance single chip solution for CMMB," said Ms Sun Zhaohui, deputy director of SARFT the Administrative Bureau of Radio Stations. "In order to successfully promote CMMB service and enable more consumers to watch TV anywhere anytime, we welcome Siano Mobile Silicon’s support of the CMMB standard as they begin to provide us with high performance CMMB receiver chips.”

There are two optional flavors to Siano's new CMMB chip: the SMS1185 supports antenna diversity – on one single chip – for both the terrestrial UHF signal and the satellite S-band signal. In other words, this single chip can be connected to two UHF antennas and two S-band antennas, for maximum performance. The lower cost SMS1180 supports only one antenna per each spectrum band. Both solutions exhibit very high sensitivity, excellent mobility performance, extremely low power consumption and the highest level of component integration. Recently conducted field trials in the leading major Chinese cities showed a clear performance advantage of the SMS118X over existing competing solutions.

"The bill of materials of a CMMB device using Siano's SMS1180 is surprisingly low, and designing products with it is simple and straightforward on the one hand, while exhibiting top-notch receiver performance on the other, " said Mu Zhongping, Vice Chief Engineer from Panda Electronics Group, widely regarded as the cradle of China's electronic industry.

"We estimate a very large market for mobile TV in China," said Alon Ironi, CEO of Siano. "We expect adoption rates similar to those seen in Japan and Korea, but with much higher nominal volumes, given the larger population of China and its popularity for multi-media enabled devices. The SMS1180 clearly positions Siano in the leading position of this new, exciting market," stated Ironi.

The SMS118X supports reception and display of multiple TV channels in parallel.
In addition, it is a true integrated solution, including two complete, distinct UHF and S-band paths, strong baseband processor for the challenging performance requirements and also all the common interfaces required for the consumer market - USB, SDIO, SPI, Memory-mapped, Transport Stream and I2C. Unlike competing solutions, the SMS118X does not require any external active component such as memory, etc., to support CMMB.

The SMS118X is available now at sample quantities, with volume production starting in August. The chip comes bundled with software drivers for Windows XP/Vista, Linux, Nucleus, and Windows Mobile.