10th Mar 2009, EETIMES
HD Radio chip marks SiPort's recovery | >
New York — SiPort, a fabless chip vendor based in Santa Clara, Calif., has re-emerged this week, three months after a horrific tragedy in which three SiPort executives, including its CEO, were fatally shot by a former employee. SiPort is heralding its return to normalcy by rolling out a low-power, single-chip HD Radio solution, now in mass production at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. using its 130nm RF CMOS process technology. SiPort's new chip, already certified by iBiquity last August, will allow consumers to listen to free-over-the-air HD Radio available in more than 1800 radio stations in the United States The IC will be designed into a new generation of MP3 players scheduled for launch by OEMs in the second half of this year, according to SiPort. The company's single-chip HD Radio receiver chip is integrated with RF radio, demodulator, memory and two embedded CPUs – ARC's 32-bit CPU cores. "It draws only 110 milliwatts (mW)," noted Sunder Velamuri, vice president of marketing at SiPort. "It's ideal for portable media players, portable navigation devices, and ultimately, mobile handsets," he added. SiPort's approach -- zoomed in on the portable device market -- marks a sharp contrast to solutions offered by its competitors such as NXP Semiconductors and Texas Instruments. The competitors' chip sets typically consume 2 to 2.5 watts, because their focus is on the automotive market, rather than the power-conscious portable device market. Meanwhile, Samsung, SiPort's closest competitor in the portable HD Radio market, has been already supplying an HD Radio chip set since last year. But SiPort's single-chip solution consumes power "25 percent less than that of Samsung," claimed Velamuri. Targeting its HD Radio chip for the portable media player market is a path yet to be trodden by the industry, if not a gamble. Stephanie Ethier, senior analyst at In-Stat, believes that "HD radio adoption will take off in automotive first and foremost." She noted that survey data shows that most Americans listen to radio in their cars more often than any other environment (home, at gym, etc.) Richard Robinson, principal analyst at iSuppli Corp, agreed. "Currently, the main growth area (and market) for HD radio is in OEM Automotive and After market solutions," he said. |