Fresco Microchip Delivers High Performance, Low Power Single-Chip Hybrid Receiver for Terrestrial and Cable Television

Highly Integrated FM2050 Enables Flexibility and Significant System Cost Reduction Across the Broad TV Market

TORONTO — Fresco Microchip Inc., a developer of leading edge RF, mixed-signal and digital signal processing integrated circuits (ICs), today announced the FM2050, its latest low power single-chip demodulator for high quality universal analog terrestrial (NTSC, PAL, SECAM), analog cable, and DVB-T digital television broadcasts.

Bridging the analog-digital broadcast TV divide around the world, the FM2050 applies the company’s innovative technologies, enabling consumers to experience true broadcast TV quality on next-generation TVs, set-top boxes, DVD-Rs, DVRs and PCs. The chip delivers unmatched performance on key analog demodulation benchmarks, which are essential for the successful rollout of hundreds of millions of high quality hybrid (analog and digital) television platforms required by the DTV transition across Europe and Asia. The FM2050 leverages the company’s breakthrough agileDSP™ architecture which virtually eliminates the part-to-part variation common in existing demodulator implementations, enabling significant system cost reduction and design simplification.

Industry watcher Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research believes Fresco is well positioned to gain a strong foot hold in this market and emerge as a market leader. “No one knows this space better than the folks at Fresco, as they have collective hands-on experience and engineering prowess, technological capability and business know-how to stake out a solid leadership position in this arena. The timing is right as consumers make the transition from analog television and embrace digital TV products over the next several years.”

The FM2050, combined with a silicon tuner, offers a compact system solution without compromising performance while meeting the low power and small footprint requirements for PC and portable TV applications. For the broader digital television market, the chip is fully compatible with “CAN” tuners to deliver the highest quality reception for DTV and television recorder platforms.

“Historically, cost, power and performance tradeoffs have been TV application dependent. Our ability to bridge those gaps enables customers to use our single-chip solution to address a broad spectrum of television platforms,” said Lance Greggain, CEO of Fresco Microchip. “The FM2050 marks a new benchmark for high quality TV performance and significant system cost reduction that leading consumer electronic manufacturers highly value.”

The FM2050 accepts the IF output directly from commonly available tuners and generates digital MPEG streams and analog CVBS video with SIF. The chip eliminates complexity by integrating universal analog video and audio demodulation, digital video demodulation and IF processing into a single IC that delivers high quality, enhanced digital and analog broadcast performance. The FM2050 supports all modes of the DVB-T standard and is compliant with free-to-air international analog demodulation broadcast standards.

The FM2050 is encapsulated in a 48-pin QFN package. Samples are available now.