Texas Instruments Announces Integrated Chip Solution for Mobile Television

Texas Instruments announced last week in  Dallas  the development of the wireless industry’s first digital TV chip for mobile telephones. The chip, code-named ” Hollywood “, will include support for DVB-H technology, collapsing the traditional three-chip solution – tuner, OFDM demodulator and channel decoder – into the industry’s first integrated single chip.

Texas Instruments does not believe that any single standard will be used worldwide, but is confident that the most prevalent standards will be those that are open and non-proprietary, most notably DVB-H. The chip will also support a handheld solution developed in Japan as part of the ISDB-T system. TI expects that DVB-H will be used across  Europe  and in  North America .

“The digital TV phone marketplace … needs technology leaders with combined wireless and consumer electronics experience like Texas Instruments to drive open standards-based digital TV handset technology,” said Michael Schueppert, Senior Vice President of Business Development for Crown   Castle , a pioneer in DVB-H infrastructure and deployment. “Just as open standards fuelled innovation and growth in the cellular phone market, the same will hold true for the digital TV phone market.” Crown   Castle recently announced plans to use 5MHz of L-band spectrum, purchased at auction last year, to develop a nationwide DVB-H network in the United States .

TI expects to provide samples of the ” Hollywood ” chip to customers in 2006. TI’s ” Hollywood ” offering will also include all needed software for television signal processing. This is expected to enable manufacturers to launch products in conjunction with the first mobile digital TV infrastructure mass deployments in 2007.