IC Adds Freeview to Mobile Phones

Microtune, a television tuner IC company, has introduced a dual-standard, dual-band tuner chip that receives and tunes both digital terrestrial TV services such as Freeview and DVB-H standard mobile TV. The expectation is that devices such as Microtune’s MT2266 will allow mobile users to access digital TV services, mobile TV, digital radio and teletext. These services, which are likely to change the ways in which TV is accessed in future, are based on the digital video broadcast-terrestrial (DVB-T) and digital video broadcast-handheld (DVB-H) standards. According to James Fontaine, Microtune president and CEO: “Our tuner enables manufacturers to develop portable products that give consumers flexible TV viewing and multimedia options. At the same time, they can add this capability without the fear of rapidly draining the battery.” Power consumption is specified at 350mW, which the company claimed can be half that of conventional DVB-T tuners. The device also supports both the UHF and VHF (Band III) radio bands. It is a direct-conversion, single-chip broadband TV tuner it contains the active circuitry required to implement a complete RF to baseband function. Currently sampling with manufacturers, the MT2266 is expected to be in production next quarter.