Microtune's world domination plans exclude Qualcomm

SILICON TV tuner specialist, Microtune, has laid out its plans for world domination in the mobile TV arena. It aims to expand its Mobile Microtuner chip to cover virtually every mobile TV standard there is - except Qualcomm's MediaFlo.

That might well be a mistake as industry watcher, Informa, has just predicted that by 2011, DVB-H handsets will form the bulk of all broadcast receiver handset sales (63 per cent), equating to 73 million units.

That's followed by MediaFLO devices with sales expected to reach 14.5 million.

What Microtune will cover includes DVB-H (already on sale), T-DMB (as used in Germany), ISDB-T (currently restricted to Japan), and DMB-TH.

DMB-TH is a new one on the INQ. The TH appears to stand for Terrestrial Handheld. It's the handheld standard developed by the Chinese from their own digital terrestrial standard - DMB-T.

To date, Microtune's plans appear to be going well. Its silicon tuner for DVB-H, the MT226X, was built into the first shipping DVB-H handset in Europe - the LG-U900 from 3 Italy and the Modeo smartphone in the USA.

The main competition will come from the likes of Freescale, Broadcom and Philips. However, Microtune already seems to have developed relationships with Asus and ATI. Its tuner chip is inside the All-in-wonder X1900 graphics card.

Microtune's roadmap is also interesting as it shows how the company intends to shrink the number of components required to put mobile TV inside a handset or a PDA. Its foundry partners are IBM, X-Fab and Jazz. µ