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Frontier Silicon launches lowest power, smallest footprint mobile TV processor

London, 14 February 2005: Frontier Silicon - the leading fabless manufacturer of semiconductors for digital radio, TV and mobile TV products - has launched Kino, a new digital baseband processor especially developed for mobile digital television. The chip is the lowest power, smallest footprint solution for enabling terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (T-DMB) services in mobile handsets.

Kino is a major step forward for mobile applications as it is a highly integrated system-on-chip which consumes less than 100mW of power and supports a full decoding rate over 1.8Mbps without the need for any external memory. To reduce the system cost, analogue functions such as the IF ADC, voltage controlled crystal oscillator (VCXO), power-on reset, and audio digital-to-analogue converters are all integrated on the chip, as is the Reed Solomon decoder, which is implemented in hardware rather than software, thereby significantly reducing the power consumption.

The significance of the integration of all these functions is the system cost and PCB usage area is significantly reduced. The benefit for mobile television is that content providers can be assured that handset cost will not be a deterrent to the uptake of their services, and that the handsets will not be excessively power hungry when running video and TV applications.

The new Kino chip from Frontier Silicon is unlike a general purpose DSP (digital signal processor) approach for T-DMB, in that it provides a dedicated hardware solution - based on the META^TM processor core and Ensigma universal communication co-processor intellectual property licensed from Imagination Technologies - which is fully programmable using software. This provides mobile TV handset manufacturers with maximum flexibility for configuring their handsets and the options that they can provide to their customers.

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Editor's notes: About Frontier Silicon

Frontier Silicon is an award-winning company at the forefront of the digital multimedia revolution with a range of semiconductor solutions for mobile digital television, digital TV and digital radio. The company develops and delivers both the broadcast signal receiver modules and digital processing circuits as individual chips and complete system modules to the leading consumer electronics and mobile phone brands.

As a fabless semiconductor business, Frontier Silicon's core products include complete DAB modules, DVB-T solutions, DMB (digital multimedia broadcasting) solutions, and the underlying system-on-chip (SoC) devices and receiver chips. Key customers for the company's products include consumer electronic, automotive entertainment and PDA/mobile phone manufacturers such as Bang & Olufsen, Cambridge Audio, Goodmans, Grundig, Hitachi, Ministry of Sound, Philips, PURE Digital, Roberts Radio, Samsung, Sharp, Sony and TEAC. Frontier Silicon has won a number of awards and its products have also enabled award-winning consumer products. The company's awards include the Fabless Semiconductor Association's start-up to watch award, PricewaterhouseCoopers hottest technology company of 2004 award, the World Economic Forum's technology pioneers to watch 2005, and the Tornado T100 award for one of the best-performing and innovative high-tech private companies.