As noted in last week's RF Report, electronics manufacturers are showing increased interest in the ATSC tuner market. Last Wednesday Samsung Electronics introduced its S5H1406 DTV receiver chip, which it claimed establishes "a new standard for terrestrial (VSB) and cable (QAM) digital TV broadcasting performance." The Samsung press release said the chip "enables digital TV receivers to acquire and track signals in harsh environments such as multi-path channel conditions, dynamic conditions with multiple signal variations and where the overall receiving capability is weak."
The chip includes an advanced demodulator and synchronization detector as well as a higher performance equalizer and forward error correction. Samsung said that in independent field tests, the S5H1406 "succeeded in acquiring and tracking the signals of five domestic terrestrial digital TV broadcasts.
The S5H1406 complements the Samsung' S5H2200 dual MPEG-2 decoder and CPU with "Digital Natural Image engine," Samsung's proprietary image improvement technology.
Dojun Rhee, vice president of the Samsung ElectronicsSoC R&D center said, "With the highly-integrated SoC device for digital TV we introduced last year, Samsung now offers a total solution in the digital TV area, from broadcast reception to image playback and image quality enhancement."
