Alps Electric Company is a major manufacturer of TV tuners for set-top boxes, VCRs and other consumer products. Last week it announced the TDQ series of tuners which are able to receive both analog and digital terrestrial broadcasts. The announcement said that "Utilizing its proprietary engineering technology and expertise accumulated over many years, Alps has developed an ultra-compact single-unit tuner that can receive both digital terrestrial and analog broadcasts, which in turn contributes to more compact and thinner set devices." The unit has an energy saving mode, although portable sets are not listed as a principal application.
The tuner includes an RF AGC circuit that has an adjustable start level that can be tailored to different input signal levels in different regions. Adjacent channel rejection is not specified, but the feature and specification show list show the bandwidth for the USA TDQU version as 5.4 MHz. Noise figure is specified as 7 dB. Minimum and maximum input levels were not specified, although Alps says a custom IC allows the tuner to achieve both wide dynamic range and low phase noise.
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