Manufacturers Can Deploy Microtune's New Tuner Chip across TVs of Every Size and Price Point to Deliver No-Compromise TV Reception for Analog, Digital and Cable Broadcasts and to Ease DTV Transition
Anticipating the massive technology transformation that will convert the North American TV market to all-digital broadcasts, Microtune Inc. unveiled a breakthrough 3-in-1 TV tuner engineered to drive very high-end digital TV reception quality into the cost-sensitive consumer TV mass market.
Integrating three tuners -- analog, digital and cable -- in a tiny chip smaller than a thumbtack, Microtune's new MicroTuner(TM) MT2131 tuner delivers benchmark-setting performance that exceeds all three existing U.S. TV requirements: ATSC, NTSC and Digital Cable Ready (DCR). Eliminating more than one hundred components from the silicon tuner bill of materials (BOM), the MT2131 slashes external BOM cost by sixty percent. By breaking through the sub - $3.00 cost barrier, it finally enables manufacturers to deploy a tuner with an unmatched level of performance across all TV models, sizes and price points -- from multi-tuner, giant-screen home theatres to small, affordable LCD TVs and inexpensive DTV set-top converter boxes.
Inventor of the single-chip silicon TV tuner, Microtune is leading the market in broadband silicon TV tuner chips with products deployed today in digital/analog TVs, personal video recorder (PVR) set-top boxes, cable modems, digital telephony modems, computers, portable DVD players, multimedia cards and PC-TV adaptors.
While the quality of the TV display has recently commanded a great deal of consumer focus, it is the tuner that actually sets the quality of the TV signal, the quality of picture and, ultimately, the quality of the TV experience for the user.
From a consumer perspective, the MT2131 is engineered to solve each of the three technical problems commonly identified by consumers as sources of DTV dissatisfaction -- TV picture break-up from interference, TV picture freezing and TV picture loss. In fact, it also significantly improves TV reception using in-attic antennas, another major consumer-related concern associated with today's digital broadcasts.
Unmatched Performance across U.S. Broadcast Standards
Based on Microtune's patented silicon tuner architecture, the MT2131 exceeds the expected performance defined by standards committees for the ATSC A/74 and Digital Cable Ready DTV specifications, while also delivering superior analog (NTSC) reception.
Engineered with excellent sensitivity, the MT2131 also exceeded, by a wide margin, the sensitivity-measurement tests published by the FCC this past December in its study of a large group of retail DTV receivers(a). The MT2131's added margin in sensitivity translates directly into an increase in digital TV signal coverage area for broadcasters.
Sensitivity is one of the key RF technical concerns of TV manufactures; another is adjacent channel rejection. The MT2131 is engineered to achieve superior sensitivity while providing excellent linearity, typically a difficult challenge for RF, analog and mixed signal integrated circuits. The MT2131's linearity performance enables it to provide industry-leading adjacent channel rejection, a measure of the ability of the tuner to block an interfering broadcast transmitter in order to tune a much weaker signal from another transmitter farther away. The MT2131 also offers a superior composite distortion performance, key for DCR applications.
MT2131 Multi-Tuner: Dramatic Integration and Cost Reduction
A single-chip device implemented in a 7mm x 7mm 48-pin QFN package, the MT2131 receives frequencies in the full 48 MHz to 1.0 GHz range and converts a selected channel to a standard intermediate frequency (IF) between 30 MHz and 57 MHz. The tuner works with all known analog and digital demodulators, giving manufacturers maximum design flexibility.
Characterized by a very high level of integration, the MT2131 incorporates several critical RF components on chip, including:
- Variable Gain Low Noise Amplifier
- Closed-Loop AGC RF Gain Control
- Integrated Broadband Power Detectors
- Variable Gain IF Amplifier
- Microtune's ClearTune Filter
- FDC Path for DCR applications
Further reducing costs, the MT2131 offers a single-ended input to eliminate an expensive external transformer balun.
With unmatched integration, the MT2131 shrinks tuner size by approximately 65% compared to traditional tuner cans, making it ideal for picture-in picture, personal video recorder or other multi-tuner architectures or for small, space-constrained TV electronics.
Price and Availability
The MT2131 tuner is sampling now to select customers and is priced at less than $3.00 in volume quantities. To simplify evaluation and design for qualified customers, Microtune offers a MicroTuner MT2131 RF Evaluation Board and Reference Design.
