Overview of Mobile TV Standards and their CMOS Tuners

The upcoming switch to digital TV in most of the world has renewed interest in terrestrial tuner implementations. More importantly, digital video reception is emerging as the latest feature towards multimedia-enriched handheld devices. Mobile, battery operated devices require small size tuners that consume low power and are amenable to single-chip integration with the baseband demodulator. In broadcast TV, the main standards expected to coexist worldwide are DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcast-Terrestrial) in Europe, ISDB-T (Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial) in Japan based on OFDM modulation (Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing) and ATSC-DTV (Advanced Television Systems Committee-Digital TV) in the USA based on 8-VSB (Vestigial Sideband Modulation). In mobile TV, several standards (summarized in Table 5.1) that will enable reception to cell-phones and other hand-held devices such as PDAs and portable music players compete globally. The most popular appears to be DVB-H (DVBHandheld) [1], which is an extension of DVB-T. Its main features are