Newport Media intros family of digital TV ICs with integrated audio-video decoder functionality

Mobile World Congress 2011, BARCELONA, SPAIN: Newport Media, an innovative fabless communications semiconductor company supplying products to the broadcast media industry, announced customer sampling of its NMI5625 dual-mode ISDB-T/analog TV and NMI5325 single-mode ISDB-T television ICs. Both ICs feature integrated H.264/AAC audio/video (A/V) decoding operation and address the rapidly growing mobile digital TV (DTV) market in Latin America.

By integrating the audio/video decoding functionality into its ISDB-T system-on-chip (SOC) products, Newport Media has dramatically simplified the task of adding digital television into consumer electronic products including mass market cellular telephones. This simplification is accomplished by removing the need for a third-party A/V decoder IC or dependency on expensive cellular baseband processors. The result is dramatically lower bill of material costs and significantly reduced time to market.

Building upon Newport Media’s industry leading 65nm ISDB-T tuner/demodulator SOCs, the NMI5625 and NMI5325 products feature an innovative A/V decoder architecture and perform the entire radio frequency (RF) tuner, demodulator and A/V decode function for ISDB-T digital TV with less than 80mW of power consumption.

Since both of these new ICs are pin-for-pin-compatible with Newport Media’s existing analog TV IC product line, existing Newport Media customers can easily upgrade their analog TV products to ISDB-T or dual-mode ISDB-T/analog TV by replacing the analog TV IC with either the NMI5325 or NMI5625 IC and making a minor software upgrade.

“Integration of the A/V decoding subsystem along with our existing RF tuner and OFDM demodulator into a single 65nm SOC is a significant technical milestone for Newport Media,” said Mohy Abdelgany, president and chief executive officer for Newport Media.

“The fact that our technical team was able to accomplish this in a 6 x 6 mm QFN package that is pin-for-pin-compatible with our existing analog TV products is an equally important business accomplishment. This package compatibility will allow the numerous analog TV cell phone models that are already in mass production to be re-configured for ISDB-T or dual-mode ISDB-T/analog TV without any additional hardware modification. This feature will make it very simple for our customers to introduce products based on these new ICs in a very short timeframe.”

Newport Media supplies a comprehensive portfolio of best-in-class SoC products addressing the world’s major m DTV standards as well as existing analog TV systems throughout the globe.

The NMI5625 and NMI5325 are currently available in sample quantities. The devices are manufactured using low-cost, 65 nanometer complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process technology and packaged in 48-pin quad flat no leads (QFN) packages.