Sharp, Samsung eye TV tuner chip market

JAPAN'S SHARP has decided to put the cat among the pigeons by announcing it was talking to up to 30 European companies about its dual-mode mobile TV chip, the VA3B5EZ915.

The company has claimed this chip is a world first and is capable of supporting two rival mobile TV standards used in Europe - DVB-H and T-DMB.

Sharp has said it will increase its production capacity for the chip to 2 million units a month - up from its current capability of around 300,000 units a month.

Korea's Samsung has plans to dominate the same space, however. It has developed a multi-standard decoder (the S3C4F31) and multi-band RF tuner (S5M8602) chipset which supports multiple digital mobile TV standards.

At the time both chips were among the first to be produced using 65 nanometre technology.

The list includes including both DVB-H (for mobile phones) and DVB-T (regular digital TV) plus T-DMB. That already puts it ahead of Sharp. But the chipset also supports DAB-IP which is used in the UK by Virgin for the Movio service.

The icing on the cake is that the product also supports ISDB-T 1 - popularly known as One-Seg. That's Japan's homegrown version of mobile TV.

One-Seg mobile TV broadcasts began back in April 2006 and total shipments of One-Seg-compatible mobile phones are expected to pass 10 million units by Q3 2007.

The market for mobile TV devises is expected to reach 12 m units worldwide in 2007 according to market researchers, Strategic Analytics and grow to 130 million units by 2011.

But these two are by no means alone in the sector. Microtune's technology, for example, was built into the first shipping DVB-H handset in Europe - the LG-U900 available from 3 Italy.

Other rivals include Freescale, Broadcom and Philips. Then there's the French in the shape of Dibcom which has produced a DVB-H chipset to go inside Sagem's mymobileTV handset.

Given this level of competition, Sharp's intention to ramp up production of its mobile TV chip looks increasingly brave. µ

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