Imagine watching TV just about anywhere—on your laptop, your PDA, or even your cell phone. All you need is a device with a screen and the XC3028 TV tuner chip. Xceive's RF-to-baseband receiver conforms to all worldwide analog and digital TV standards, including NTSC, PAL, SECAM, DVB-C, DVB-T, ISDVT, ATSC (HDTV), and DOCSIS.
This 44-pin dual-conversion receiver tunes through a phase-locked-loop synthesizer. The tuning input comes from an external source via an I2C interface. The second IF output is sent to a fast internal analog-to-digital converter. There, the signal is digitized and sent to the on-chip DSP, which handles all of the demodulation and standards details. The output goes to digital-to-analog converters, where the signal is sent for display and audio.
The input tuning ranges from 42 to 862 MHz. Tuning settling time is only 5 ms, which is much faster than older, traditional tuners with switching times ranging from 100 to 200 ms. The noise figure is less than 8 dB, the automatic-gain-control range is 80 dB, and the image rejection is 55 dB minimum. With this huge dynamic range, the chip can handle a wide spectrum of amplitude variations of signals on adjacent channels.
The XC3028 comes in a 44-pin MLF package that measures 7 by 7 by 0.85 mm (see the figure). It operates from 1.8 to 3.3 V and consumes less than 1 W. The XC2028 version of the chip, which only handles analog TV signals and standards, has similar specifications. The XC3028 costs $15 in low volume, and the XC2028 costs $6 in higher volume. Samples of both are available now. Production quantities will be ready early in the fourth quarter.
Xceive Corp. www.xceive.com