Silicon Laboratories provides Mitsumi with highly integrated TV tuner

AUSTIN, USA: Silicon Laboratories Inc., a leader in high-performance, analog-intensive, mixed-signal ICs, announced that its highly integrated Si2170 TV tuner has been selected by Mitsumi for iDTV and set-top box modules.

Mitsumi chose Silicon Labs’ single-chip analog and digital TV tuner because of its leading performance, lowest system cost and strong roadmap for further integration.

Mitsumi is a leading TV module and subsystem board maker in Japan that provides high-performance, cost-competitive modules to TV and set-top box OEMs. The Si2170 device enables Mitsumi to deliver unparalleled size reduction and higher performance than using a traditional mixed oscillator phase-locked loop (MOPLL)-based solution.

Enhanced performance in key metrics such as sensitivity, selectivity and blocking directly impacts the end-user reception experience, a key criteria for Mitsumi’s OEM customers.

“This early design win validates the strong performance of our silicon tuner solution,” said Tyson Tuttle, vice president of Silicon Laboratories. “Customers globally are evaluating this solution and uniformly acknowledging that it is the highest performance silicon tuner available. We believe our patented approach will enable TV makers to finally replace expensive and complex discrete tuner technology.”

Silicon Labs’ patented and proven digital low-IF architecture enables the Si2170 TV tuner to achieve the highest level of performance and integration while addressing the challenges created by hybrid analog and digital reception and multiple regional standards.

The architecture allows many functions that typically rely on analog and discrete fixed components to be implemented with cost-effective and software-programmable digital signal processing. This breakthrough enables TV manufacturers to use a single hardware platform to optimize system parameters and comply with all worldwide cable and terrestrial broadcast standards such as ATSC/QAM, DVB-T/C, ISDB-T/C, NTSC, PAL and SECAM.

Additionally, the integrated ATV demodulator creates a universal interface to system ICs, which further simplifies the customer’s design and enables coordination of tuner and demodulator functions to optimize reception of analog TV signals, eliminating visual beats or artifacts.

Silicon Laboratories’ Si2170 TV tuner is based on a number of patented RF innovations and has more than a dozen patents pending on the architecture and design.