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.
“The worldwide transition to digital television is increasingly spanning a widening range of consumer electronics and peripherals,” said James A. Fontaine, Microtune’s President and CEO. “Our new MT2130 leverages the superior engineering, excellent performance and reliability that have come to characterize Microtune tuners, and it adapts our market-proven RF technology for new classes of power-sensitive digital TV devices. By deploying the MT2130 chip, our customers can differentiate their portable products by offering superior TV reception across the analog and digital broadcasts that exist today.”
Microtune’s new MT2130 is based on the architecture of the company’s three-in-one tuner — the MT2131 analog/digital/cable tuner. The MT2130 is engineered to receive weak signals and to compensate for the small, built-in antennas typical of portable products. It deploys Microtune’s ClearTune filtering technology to improve channel reception and is engineered to minimize noise and distortion for consistent, stable picture quality.
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 ¼-inch 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 permits users to enable ‘watch and record’ two or more channels simultaneously.
The MT2130 tuner is sampling now to select customers and is priced at less than $3.00 in volume quantities.