Newport Media intros family of ICs for broadcast and cable TV systems

LAKE FOREST, USA: Newport Media, an innovative fabless communications semiconductor company supplying products to the broadcast media industry, announced customer sampling of its new line of RF tuner ICs for fixed broadcast and cable TV markets.

The NMI120 addresses the market for digital-only television products (primarily set-top boxes) while the NMI130 and NMI131 address the market for hybrid digital and analog television products (cable set-top boxes and LCD TVs). The NMI120, NMI130 and NMI131 are fully compliant with DVB-T, ISDB-T, ATSC and DTMB digital television standards. The NMI130 and NMI131 additionally support DVB-C, DOCSIS and other cable TV standards as well as NTSC, PAL and SECAM analog TV standards. The NMI131 also incorporates an analog TV demodulator.

Building upon Newport Media’s industry-leading 65nm mobile TV tuner/demodulator system-on-chips (SoCs), the NMI120, NMI130 and NMI131 products feature an innovative RF tuner architecture that provides superior key RF performance metrics (noise figure, linearity and adjacent channel selectivity), while simultaneously achieving less than 180mW power consumption, which is amongst the lowest in the industry.

Packaged in a compact and cost-effective 4mm X 4mm quad flat no-lead (QFN) package and requiring the industry’s smallest external bill of materials, the new high-performance RF tuners are ideally suited for the next generation of television, set-top box and tuner module designs that will replace costly discrete modules and first-generation silicon RF tuner designs.

“There is a major shift underway in the market for terrestrial broadcast and cable TV equipment away from traditional discrete tuners to CMOS RF tuner IC-based designs,” said Mohy Abdelgany, president and CEO, Newport Media. “First generation RF tuner IC solutions currently on the market have done a great job of demonstrating the viability of the silicon tuner approach. The tuner product line we are introducing today, by virtue of its high performance and very low solution cost, will further accelerate this trend and Newport Media is looking forward to competing in this large and expanding market segment.”

The NMI120, NMI130, and NMI131 are currently available in mass production quantities. The devices are manufactured using low-cost, 65 nanometer complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process technology and packaged in 24-pin QFN packages.