ESS Announces CMOS Hybrid TV Tuner Utilizing Breakthrough Radio Technology

FREMONT, Calif. — ESS Technology, a leading provider of high performance audio/video solutions, today unveils RadiX, the highest performance CMOS hybrid TV tuner for worldwide analog and digital terrestrial and cable TV reception.

The RadiX TV Tuner is the industry’s lowest power and highest performance CMOS based multi-standard silicon tuner designed to replace and outperform conventional Can tuners, exceeding the A/74 specification by a wide margin. With built-in LNA and SAW filters, the RadiX supports digital TV standards such as ATSC (8-VSB), QAM, DVB-T and DVB-C, analog TV standards such as NTSC, PAL and SECAM, as well as FM radio formats, enabling the lowest bill of materials.

The RadiX TV Tuner is based on 19 issued or pending ESS patents including: Virtual Weaver Architecture (the first fundamental advance in tuner technology since 1956), Direct Sampling Mixer, Channel Selection Filter, and Advanced High Resolution Synthesizer. The new Virtual Weaver architecture eliminates the need for precise matching of components enabling high performance at a low cost. The RadiX tuner also uses a fast systolic analog array integrated in a discrete signal processing engine and a digital signal processing unit to tune the channels. The result is a high performance, low-power tuner with an extremely fast channel locking time. The discrete signal processor replaces several power hungry blocks found in traditional tuner. This technology dramatically reduces the power consumption of the tuner to less than 400 mW. A sleep mode can be enabled for a minimal 1.2 mW power consumption.

XD Analog Architecture

The RadiX TV Tuner is built on ESS’s XD Analog architecture, a revolutionary analog design philosophy that enables the realization of extreme performance analog functions in standard digital processes. It is based upon leveraging the inherent advantages of digital processes; the ability to integrate a dense array of transistors in a tiny area for low cost and low power. Rather than building analog functions using transistors that are relatively large in order to reduce noise and obtain good matching, ESS uses a large number of relatively small transistors strategically interconnected in order to achieve equal, and usually better, performance. This is the same approach used in ESS’s critically acclaimed Sabre DAC and ADC products.

TV Everywhere

“The growing adoption of TV reception in portable, mobile and automotive devices means that TV viewing is no longer limited to the living room,” said Robert Wong, vice-president of marketing and worldwide sales for ESS Technology. “By utilizing ESS’s advanced technology, the RadiX tuner can achieve conventional Can tuner performance with the lowest power consumption and bill of materials. This breakthrough new tuner is poised to revolutionize the TV tuner market and become the tuner of choice for TV reception everywhere.”

Availability

The RadiX TV Tuner will be sampling in February 2010 in 40-QFN package.

The RadiX TV Tuner will be demonstrated January 7 – 10, 2010 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas at the Hilton. Appointments may be scheduled by calling Wendy Chafer at 510-492-1180.