Microtune Unveils New Analog/Digital TV Tuner for Portable Devices

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Microtune has announced a new tuner chip that brings quality digital TV to PC notebooks, portable TVs, tuner sticks, portable DVD players and other small devices that demand both high performance and lower power. Called the MicroTuner MT2130, the new tuner, when integrated into portable consumer products, allows users to watch analog and digital TV across cable or off-air broadcasts, to time-shift programs and to capture video for multimedia applications.

Microtune's new MT2130 is based on the architecture of the company's three-in-one tuner - the MT2131 analog/digital/cable tuner, the only silicon TV tuner engineered to meet and exceed the U.S. digital receiver performance parameters of the ATSC standard. The MT2130 offers the dramatic integration, broad-based functionality and reduced bill-of-materials advantages of the MT2131, but with 20% lower power.

Based on its real-world experience with mobile and PC-TV tuner applications, Microtune designed the MT2130 to meet the specific RF technical requirements of power-sensitive, space-constrained products. First, the MT2130 is engineered with excellent sensitivity to receive weak signals and to compensate for the small, built-in antennas typical of portable products. Like its MT2131 predecessor, the MT2130 exceeds, 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. For the consumer, the chip's superior sensitivity translates directly into uncompromised picture quality.

Second, the MT2130 deploys Microtune's unique ClearTune filtering technology to improve channel reception. Television bands worldwide are becoming increasingly congested with the simulcasting of legacy analog transmissions and new digital channels. Competing or undesired adjacent channels are now frequently encountered, causing disruption to both analog and digital signals. Microtune's patent-pending ClearTune technology, built into the MT2130, provides significant immunity to these interfering signals. From a consumer perspective, the MT2130 tuner is engineered to minimize noise and distortion for consistent, stable picture quality.

The MT2130 tuner packs the functionality of three tuners (analog, digital terrestrial, cable) into a miniature device, eliminating numerous external components for a very cost-effective design. The chip supports multiple TV transmission standards (ATSC, QAM, DVB-T, ISDB-T, DMB-T, NTSC, PAL and SECAM). As a result, it permits manufacturers to deploy the same tuner on multiple platforms, gaining economies of scale, while providing a single solution that cost-effectively bridges the multiple analog and digital TV standards that co-exist today.

At a mere ?-inches in size, the MT2130 chip fits into very small designs, such as dongle or flash-stick packages, and can be easily configured in multi-tuner architectures. Multi-tuner architectures enable diversity applications and permit users to enable 'watch and record' two or more channels simultaneously.

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