June 12, 2012 – Silicon Laboratories (Country Manager Jong-Chan Lee), a global leader in high-performance analog-intensive mixed-signal ICs, announced today the broadcast industry's most advanced single-chip multimedia demodulator, which simplifies the design of iDTV, set-top boxes (STBs), and Blu-ray/DVD recorders for developers. The newly developed Si2169 is the first demodulator to integrate the emerging DVB-T2 and Advanced DVB-S2 standards, as well as the existing DVB-T, DVB-S, and DVB-C standards, onto a single CMOS chip to support terrestrial, satellite, and cable TV broadcasting.

The Si2168/69 demodulator products deliver industry-leading DVB-T2 terrestrial broadcast performance and outperform other competing DVB-T2 products, while fully complying with NorDig 2.2.1 and D-Book 7 specifications even under demanding reception conditions. These demodulators provide excellent echo performance across all DVB-T2 transmission modes, even under the most demanding echo conditions, and achieve the industry's fastest DVB-T2 channel lock time. In fact, unlike competing demodulators that typically require long times to track demanding channels, Silicon Labs has applied a special architecture to reduce DVB-T2 lock time to the industry's best level.

When used with Silicon Labs' market-leading Silicon TV tuners, Si2168/69 demodulators provide a complete video front-end solution from RF to baseband. The Si2168/69 architecture is also highly flexible enough to support other tuner options, including MOPLL (mixer oscillator phase-locked loop) based modules and standard IF (intermediate frequency) terrestrial silicon tuners.

James Stansberry, Vice President and Head of Broadcast Products at Silicon Labs, said, “The Si2169 leverages a proven digital demodulation architecture to reduce the complexity, power consumption, and cost of video front-end designs while delivering excellent reception performance for each digital broadcast type. Based on features such as next-generation DVB-T2/S2 multimedia support and single-chip integration, the Si2169 is the industry’s most flexible and high-performance demodulator solution.”

The Si2168/69 is the smallest footprint digital TV and multimedia demodulator, ideal for ultra-thin iDTV designs that can be applied directly to main TV/STB boards or within compact modules. The Si2168/69 simplifies the system Bill of Materials (BoM) and lowers costs by not requiring expensive specific components. Additionally, it utilizes only two power supplies, resulting in the industry's lowest power consumption (typically 450mW) in the most computationally intensive DVB-T2 mode.

Price and supply
The Si2169 and Si2168 demodulators are available in a 7mm x 7mm 48-pin QFN package and are currently available for samples and production. Pricing for the Si2169 and Si2168 starts at $9.94 and $7.92, respectively, based on 10,000-unit quantities. Silicon Labs provides a comprehensive evaluation platform for video front-end designs, including the DVB-T2/T/C/S/S2 Si2169 EVB with an integrated industry-leading Si2176 hybrid tuner and the DVB-T2/T/C Si2168 EVB with an integrated Si2146 digital-only tuner.

More information about Silicon Labs' TV modulator products and purchasing samples can be found at www.silabs.com/pr/tv-demodulator .