Newport Media, a 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.

Mohy Abdelgany, president and chief executive officer for Newport Media, said in a release, “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.”

“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,” Abdelgany added.

The NMI120 is most suitable for digital-only television products such as set-top boxes and the NMI130 and NMI131 are suitable for hybrid digital and analog television products like cable set-top boxes and LCD TVs.

Officials revealed that the NMI120, NMI130 and NMI131 are fully compliant with DVB-T, ISDB-T, ATSC and DTMB digital television standards. The NMI130 and NMI131 also support DVB-C, DOCSIS and other cable TV standards besides offering support to NTSC, PAL and SECAM analog TV standards. The NMI131 also incorporates an analog TV demodulator.

The NMI120, NMI130 and NMI131 products are based on Newport Media’s 65nm mobile TV tuner/demodulator system-on-chips (SoCs). They feature an innovative RF tuner architecture that provides superior key RF performance metrics like noise figure, linearity and adjacent channel selectivity besides helping in the simultaneous achievement of less than 180mW power consumption. This is amongst the lowest in the industry, pointed out officials.

The new high-performance RF tuner devices come packaged in a compact and cost-effective 4mm X 4mm quad flat no-lead (QFN) package. They are suited for the next generation of television, set-top box and tuner module designs. They can easily replace discrete modules and first-generation silicon RF tuner designs which are more expensive.

Company sources added that the NMI120, NMI130, and NMI131 are currently available in mass production quantities. The manufacturing process involves the use of low-cost, 65 nanometer complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process technology.

Newport Media announced recently that it has reached a key milestone in company history with cumulative shipments of more than 50 million complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) SoCs that address multiple global standards for broadcast Mobile TV.